This talk was delivered at the Irish National Party Summer Conference on July 4th, 2026. I want to thank everyone who made this event possible.

This is my first visit to Ireland. I didn’t come to see the Cliffs of Moher, the Guinness Storehouse, the Book of Kells, the Ring of Kerry, or the Blarney Stone. I came to see the Irish National Party. I came to listen and learn from you, because in recent years, I’ve been very impressed by the Irish resistance to the Great Replacement.

But to listen and learn, I must speak. It is the price of admission. I’ve decided to do something dangerous. I’m going to talk about Irish nationalism. But don’t worry, even though I’m an American, I don’t think that watching a movie about Michael Collins makes me an expert on your politics. I simply wish to speak as an outsider about what looks to me like eight enviable advantages of Irish nationalism.

Ethnic nationalism is a very simple idea. The world will be a better place if each and every people has the right to its own sovereign homeland, where they can pursue their own way of life free from outside interference. Thus if you are losing your homeland to replacement migration, your duty is simple. You must close your borders and remigrate the colonists. Ireland is for the Irish. The invaders must go.

Stated this way, ethnic nationalism is a universal ideology. I believe this is completely defensible. Even though nationalist movements will be as different as their nations, the basic rationale for national self-determination is the same for all of them.

A simple, morally defensible message is best when we have small numbers, slim resources, and are fighting an uphill battle against powerful enemies. But still, many nationalist movements insist on increasing their burdens by linking national self-determination to extraneous concerns. Because of your history, however, Irish nationalists have fewer such temptations.

Point 1: Ireland Never Had an Empire.

As an ethnonationalist, I am an opponent of imperialism. Just because I am an American, I don’t defend American imperialism, although that’s the first reflex of a patriot. But ethnic nationalists in many white countries succumb to that reflex. I guess they call us reactionaries for a reason.

But that’s a danger.

First of all, imperialism is nothing to celebrate. It causes a host of political, cultural, and demographic problems. Every empire is created by leaders who are willing to kill a few of their own people to take the lands of strangers. Once an empire is established, it typically elevates collaborators among the conquered, who eventually fuse with the elite of the conquerors and then lord it over the common people who think the empire is “theirs.” Thus even at their height, empires allow the culture and genes of the conquered to alter the conquerors.

Ruling an empire is like riding a tiger. It’s perfectly safe. You must simply maintain control of the tiger, forever. But, since nothing lasts forever, sometimes the tiger ends up riding you. Thus Britain and France are now drowning in the Afro-Asiatic backwash of their empires. Increasingly, these invaders are dropping the pretense of “enriching” their former masters and admitting that they come for plunder and vengeance.

Second, imperialism causes intellectual problems as well. Many nationalists feel the need to defend bygone empires for two reasons. First, they feel national pride and nostalgia for them. Second, since guilty feelings about past empires lower white resistance to race replacement, shouldn’t we argue that empires were actually good things? (A better response is simply to say: Two wrongs don’t make a right. If imperialism is bad, then so is reverse imperialism.)

Defending imperialism is bad because it undermines our own case for self-determination. Beyond that, it is a barrier to international cooperation between White Nationalists.

There are two basic defenses of empire on the Right.

The first is that “might is right.” But if might is right, on what grounds can we complain about being subjugated and replaced in our own homelands? After all, the Left and the migrants have the whip in hand now.

Imagine trying to enlist the sympathy of outside parties by chronicling the migrant rape gangs, then ending with, “But after all, might is right.” It is a strange doctrine for tiny, beleaguered minorities to espouse.

The second defense is that empires may have denied the self-determination of various peoples, but think of the comforts they provided: law and order, railways, canals, steamships, running water, flush toilets, vaccinations, longer lives, etc.

Imagine upholding such a value system and then arguing that your countrymen need to risk life and limb—or merely higher prices—for national self-determination.

Nostalgia for empire also creates awkward moments when English nationalists wish to cooperate with Irish nationalists, German nationalists with Polish nationalists, etc. When Hitler ravaged Poland, it may have been evil, but it wasn’t pointless. At least he envisioned some benefit for Germany. But I don’t see how verbally defending such policies today brings any benefit to any white nation. It is just pointless, self-indulgent, self-defeating behavior.

Not only was Ireland never an empire, Ireland spent centuries trying to get out of the British empire. I think this is a great advantage for Irish nationalists today.

First, you see our struggle more clearly: it is anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. Today, every white nation is subjugated by an imperial global system. Every migrant is a colonist of that empire.

Second, a legacy of empire corrupts patriotism. Americans and Russians love their homeland conditionally, because it is great and powerful. The true patriot loves his homeland unconditionally. Be it ever so humble, he loves it just because it is his own.

Third, having fought to free yourselves from the British empire, the Irish should also have some immunity to “might is right” arguments. Eight centuries of foreign domination did not extinguish the sense that there is something evil about being ruled by foreigners for their interests at your expense.

Fourth, the lack of an empire deprives Ireland’s Third-World colonizers of the excuses used in Britain and France. They aren’t from your former colonies. You don’t owe them reparations for anything.

Yes, they are still here. Yes, they are still coming. But they aren’t coming because they have good arguments. Like locusts, they don’t need arguments. They come simply to take what is yours.

The arguments are meant for you, to get you to drop your defenses. But without appeals to colonialism and reparations, it is much harder for them to legitimize their presence in Ireland, which makes it easier for you to argue for their removal.

Indeed, for Irish nationalists, the anti-colonial arguments work for you, not against you.

Point Two: Ireland Was Never “A Nation of Immigrants.”

In America, we are told that we can’t have borders because we are “a nation of immigrants.” Spelled out fully, the “nation of immigrants” argument is: Because America was settled by very similar peoples from Europe (many of whom struggled against assimilation), America should open its borders to very different peoples from around the world (and not assimilate them, because that is contrary to the spirit of multiculturalism). What could possibly go wrong? This is a dumb argument, just on the face of it.

If anti-whites wish to justify the Third-World colonization of Ireland by reference to past episodes of white immigration, the only thing they can point to is the Ulster Plantation, the hostile act of a foreign empire to dispossess the Irish of their homeland. This is why it is brilliant to refer to today’s Third-World colonists as a new imperial “plantation.”

Anti-whites will say just about anything to justify the destruction of white nations. Since Ireland was never a “nation of immigrants,” some people argue for immigration because Ireland was in fact a “nation of emigrants.” The world welcomed Irish immigrants, so out of fairness, the Irish should welcome the world.

Let’s set aside the facts that many Irish emigrants were little more than slaves, and that they were not exactly welcome in the New World. The main problem with this argument is that the Irish of today are not the people who emigrated. They are the people who stayed in their homeland. Thus you are being told that, because your ancestors chose to remain in your homeland, justice requires that you now give it away. It’s almost cute—or it would be if it weren’t evil

Point Three: Ireland Knows Diversity Is Not a Strength.

Unlike America, it was never possible to depict Ireland as having always been a diverse, multicultural salad bowl. Within the lifetimes of many in this room, the main form of diversity in Ireland was between two genetically and culturally almost identical European peoples who hated each other enough to plant bombs in one another’s neighborhoods. Even a tiny amount of diversity gave rise to a host of troubles.

There is no depth of dishonesty and absurdity to which our enemies will not sink, but for me, the worst are politicians who piously eulogize the ancient tribal conflicts of the very similar peoples of the British Isles, then cheerfully welcome in Somalis and Pakistanis, because diversity is strength.

Point Four: Ireland’s Ethnic Identity Is Strong.

It is much easier to advocate ethnic nationalism in a society with a strong sense of ethnic identity. Redefining a nation in terms of “culture” and “values” only becomes tempting once one has thrown away the unity of blood.

Because Ireland has never had to assimilate large numbers of immigrants until recently, there’s never been much pressure to synthesize a fake Irish civic nationalism based on “values” like openness and tolerance, which mean openness to and tolerance of being replaced in one’s homeland.

Your people have a higher-than-average immunity to such nonsense, and that’s another advantage for Irish nationalism. In America, I can’t even convince White Nationalists that Americans constitute a distinct ethnic group.

Point Five: Ireland Has a Living Revolutionary Nationalist Tradition.

The most insidious argument for empire is the same one offered for globalization today: the loss of sovereignty will promote prosperity and peace. Everybody wants prosperity and peace. Only idealists and patriots prize national sovereignty over Last Man comforts. I think Irish nationalists have some advantages here too.

First of all, the proper response to the bourgeois argument is that those who sacrifice sovereignty for peace and plenty will end up with none of them in the end. In truth, the Great Replacement does not make us richer and more secure but the exact opposite. The swiftness of Ireland’s colonization and decline makes it easier for Irish nationalists to make this argument.

Second, only a little more than a century ago, Ireland was freed by men who put national sovereignty above comfort, security, and even life itself. This prodigious blood sacrifice has not been forgotten. You are much closer to your heroic revolutionary moment than we Americans, who are celebrating the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence today. That too is an advantage for Irish nationalists.

Point Six: Ireland Doesn’t Have a Monarchy or Pretenders to a Throne.

Another advantage is your republicanism. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” he was simply affirming the republican principle that there is no hereditary right to rule. Jefferson did not think that heredity was unimportant. Nor did he think that all men were equally capable of ruling. But he rejected the idea that heredity was a reliable way to ensure that the best men rule. I agree with this.

Hereditary rule is wrong about two central issues of political philosophy: the nature of sovereignty and the nature of aristocracy, i.e., rule by the best.

Hereditary rule descends, ultimately, from the idea that a land and its people are simply property that can be passed on by inheritance. This is obviously incompatible with the classical idea of popular sovereignty. You can’t be sovereign if you are property: someone’s inheritance, someone’s dowry, someone’s source of revenue.

But can’t we reconcile monarchy with popular sovereignty? Not hereditary monarchy. Popular sovereignty means that the common good of the people is the highest law, the principle of political legitimacy.

If you take the common good seriously, then political office should be based on merit. But in a society of millions, how likely is it that the best man for any office is the firstborn son of the incumbent? And if he is, he deserves the job because of his qualifications, not his heredity. Any society that promotes based on merit will always have an advantage over those that promote based on heredity. That’s true in politics as well as business.

This isn’t necessarily an argument for abolishing ancient institutions. But it is an argument for depoliticizing them as much as possible: in effect, putting them in a museum. And indeed, most monarchies today are constitutional, meaning subject to popular sovereignty, and largely ceremonial.

Hereditary monarchy and aristocracy are glittering but empty simulacra of genuine aristocracy. Imagine feeling the need to defend the House of Windsor. You are lucky to be free of such baggage. I hope you build a genuinely aristocratic republic. You can begin by attracting the best people in your society to the Irish National Party. I think you are off to a good start.

Point Seven: Ireland Is Part of the Anglosphere.

As in Ukraine, Ireland’s colonizers imposed a foreign language. I fully understand the desire to decolonize one’s language. When Israel was founded, Hebrew was nobody’s mother tongue. They literally brought it back from the dead. If things had gone slightly differently a century ago, you all might be speaking Gaelic, and I would be looking very, very confused.

But English is your mother tongue, and even though you might regard it more as your evil-stepmother tongue, there are some consolations.

Speaking English makes it easier for you to communicate to the world at large. It makes it easier for the world to follow events in Ireland. It makes it easier for you to communicate and cooperate with nationalists in other countries. I have noticed that Nationalists in larger European nations like France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, are more linguistically insular than nationalists from small nations that have widely adopted English as the new lingua franca. Finally, English connects you to the world-wide Irish diaspora, most of whose ancestors left before Ireland became independent. These are advantages for Irish nationalists.

Yes, speaking only Gaelic would impede the influx of bad ideas and migrants. But such problems would persist if English remained your second language.

Point Eight: Ireland Has a Diaspora & Sympathizers Around the Globe.

There’s a strange phenomenon on the American Right that I call “telescopic ethnonationalism.” Americans like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk seem to believe that America is a proposition nation, or at least they are unwilling to challenge that dogma. But they will defend ethnonationalist arguments for white people overseas: for South Africans, for Germans, for Irishmen.

If Elon Musk is willing to affirm Irish nationalism, just imagine what Irish Americans might be willing to do for you. Irish-American attachment to the old country is probably exceeded only by Jewish-American attachment to Israel. Irish nationalism has been fostered by the Irish diaspora since the nineteenth century. I hope you are benefiting from it today.

As globalism breaks down and ethnonationalism struggles to be born in America, I hope that Americans will sublimate some of their frustrated nationalist sentiments into support for the Irish cause. In a sense, that’s what I’m doing here today. I wish you the best. You are an inspiration to us all.

From the 2026 Counter-Currents Spring Retreat in Rome.

Scott Greer
Whitepill: The Online Right & the Making of Trump’s America
Los Angeles: Passage Press, 2026

Scott Greer’s Whitepill is a well-written insider’s account of two triumphs, of populism and Right-wing metapolitics, that have reshaped American conservatism. Greer’s protagonist is the “online Right,” which basically means a constellation of webzines, blogs, and video and social media channels defending forms of populism and white identity politics, while attacking both the Left and the mainstream Right. The story of these triumphs is the “whitepill” of Greer’s title, which is internet slang for good news.

Greer also chronicles the defeat of one form of online Right-wing metapolitics, namely the Alt Right, which failed when it tried to come offline and become actual politics. The backdrop of the whole tale is the political career of Donald Trump.

Scott Greer is the ideal person to write this book. He’s a political journalist with an eye for concrete details that beautifully crystallize larger political issues. He had a front-row seat on the events he narrates, with one foot in the American conservative movement and another in the Alt Right.

Scott Greer arrived in Washington D.C. in early 2013. He began working at the Leadership Institute, where Kevin Deanna (a.k.a. Gregory Hood and James Kirkpatrick) previously worked. Greer fell in with the colorful D.C. Alt-Right circle, which, in addition to some very fine people, also included “a heroin addict with sociopathic tendencies, an unstable taxi driver who couldn’t control his racial outbursts, and one likely federal agent who tried to recruit us into a militia” (p. 87). But surely the worst character was Katie McHugh, a scene groupie who, when she finally washed out, doxed him and wrecked his mainstream career.

From 2014 to 2015, Greer wrote for and edited Richard Spencer’s Radix webzine. He also worked for The Daily Caller. In 2017, Greer published No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination (World Net Daily Books). After leaving The Daily Caller, Greer worked for a conservative public relations firm and began writing another book with the support of a Robert Novak Fellowship. But in 2018, he was doxed for his association with Radix, fired from his job, stripped of his fellowship, denounced by his former colleagues, and cast into the wilderness, where he has been trying to relaunch his promising career as a conservative journalist.

Since then, Greer’s primary platforms have been Twitter/X, Substack (where he has a newsletter, Highly Respected), and Revolver News, edited by Right-wing Jew and fellow doxing victim Darren Beattie. Recently, Greer began writing for The American Conservative. This is a positive sign that mainstream conservative platforms are shifting towards a greater openness to white identity politics. But opposition on the Left is undiminished. Thus when two of Greer’s American Conservative columns were reprinted by The Washington Post, they were removed due to kvetching about his dox. Whitepill is clearly part of Greer’s comeback plan.

Greer sets the stage for the emergence of the online Right with a description of mainstream Republican thinking on immigration and national identity. It was overwhelmingly awful. Republicans were committed to amnesty, open borders, and civic nationalism, which basically means: white Americans are fungible with any featherless biped who will swear an oath to American “values.”

This Republican consensus has been completely overthrown, largely due to the confluence of two factors: the online Right and the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Greer also devotes a chapter to the increasing racial polarization and political correctness of the Obama years.

We’ve come a long way since then.

These chapters are necessary to Greer’s argument, because he can’t argue that things have gotten better without establishing just how bad things were. Compared to where White Nationalism was in the year 2000, we’ve made enormous progress. This is easy to forget, given the immense censorship, deplatforming, and harassment we have endured. It is also easy to forget when measured against what we need to do to save our race. Moreover, compared to earlier Republicans, Donald Trump is an enormous improvement. It is also easy to lose sight of this fact, because when compared to what is required to save America, Trump is a major disappointment.

According to Greer, “The Right today bears little resemblance to what I first encountered in 2013, in large part due to the triumph of the pseudonymous world (where I worked in secret) over the established institutions (where I was building my career)” (p. 8).

Greer emphasizes that the online Right was both populist (“a bottom-up revolt,” p. 5) and metapolitical, i.e., about spreading ideas and networking, both of which took place largely online.

What is the relationship between the Alt Right, which features prominently in Greer’s narrative, and the “online Right”? The Alt Right is a current of the online Right, which existed before the Alt Right and carried on after its demise. Between the middle of 2015 and the end of 2017, the Alt Right was the biggest current of the online Right.

The main issues of the Alt Right were white identity politics, America-first nationalism, popular sovereignty, traditional family values, and freedom of speech. The Alt Right opposed anti-whiteness, globalization, immigration, feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. These are the central issues of the online Right today.

What is the relationship of the Alt Right with White Nationalism? The phrase “alternative Right” was coined by Paul Gottfried in a talk to the H. L. Mencken Club in November of 2008. It first appeared online at Taki’s Magazine (then edited by Richard Spencer) in December of 2008.

Richard Spencer launched AlternativeRight.com in early 2010 with start-up money from William H. Regnery II. Regnery was the founder of The Occidental Quarterly, which is a White Nationalist publication. TOQ is both race-realist and discusses the so-called “Jewish question.” In America, TOQ is the standard of White Nationalist metapolitical orthodoxy.

But Regnery wasn’t interested just in orthodoxy. He was also interested in outreach. Thus he founded the H. L. Mencken Club as an outreach organization for White Nationalism, basically a forum where people who were not White Nationalists could interact with those who were.

Regnery founded Alternativeright.com for the same reason, with the same formula. Like the Mencken Club, Spencer’s webzine welcomed many different strands of Rightist thought, but its goal was to promote White Nationalism.

Alternativeright.com got off to a strong start, but after a year, Spencer seems to have lost interest in the project. Eventually, Colin Liddel and Andy Nowicki took over editing the site. Then, Spencer shut it down at the end of 2013 and launched a new webzine called Radix.

The term “Alternative Right” stuck around, however, because it was useful. It created a discursive space where different factions of the Right and the public in general could encounter our ideas. It allowed people to flirt with elements of White Nationalism while maintaining plausible deniability. Thus I used the term at Counter-Currents, as did many of my writers.

From 2012 to 2014, the online Right got a lot bigger due to the confluence of four factors: the Left-Right polarization among libertarians after the Ron Paul 2012 campaign, the protests and moral panics coalescing around fake black martyrs like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the growth of the “manosphere,” and the “Gamergate” controversy. Many new people discovered Counter-Currents and other White Nationalist platforms around this time, and they stayed, because white identity politics made sense to them.

At the beginning of 2015, a new political movement had clearly emerged. White identity politics was at the core of it, including biological race realism. The manosphere also played an important role, because biological sex differences were just as salient and just as powerfully explanatory as biological race differences.

The Jewish question was certainly discussed. But it wasn’t central. There was an anti-liberal element to the new synthesis, but this too was not universal, especially given the massive recent influx of libertarians. Populism was also in the mix, but there were many elitist elements influenced by Nietzsche, Evola, and even the Neo-Reactionaries, another form of the online Right. Nationalism, of course, was part of the conversation. But there were anti-nationalist strands as well. Finally, National Socialism was inevitably in the mix, but it was by no means dominant.

I was a member of the private forum that had given rise to The Right Stuff website and its podcast The Daily Shoah. In early 2015, there was a debate about what to call this new movement. Many favored the “Alt Right.” I defended this choice. A few opposed it, largely because they associated it with Richard Spencer, who was generally seen in TRS circles as a pompous fool. But in the end, “Alt Right” won out, because it was short, made a good hashtag, and was suitably vague. Opposition to Spencer also melted over time, because in the land of the anonymous, even a pompous fool can be king, as long as he is willing to put his face out there.

I was perfectly content with Counter-Currents being an “Alt Right” platform, because that provided us with an audience and a set of questions for intellectual exploration and debate, debates I was confident that we could win.

At the beginning of June 2015, I remember looking down from our lofty metapolitical heights and feeling rather bored with American politics. I wondered what new horror tickets the Republicans had in store for us. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio? Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor? The extreme-Right specter of Ted Cruz?

Then Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president while rejecting the establishment consensus that immigration, globalization, and multiculturalism were sacrosanct. Until Trump came on the scene, no decent politician would compete on these issues, since doing so was seen as pandering to the lowest forms of populism, nationalism, and racism.

The whole Alt Right was jolted awake. Practically everyone I knew coalesced around supporting Trump’s candidacy. The Republican base also loved Trump, because American voters want patriotism, sensible social conservatism, non-interventionism, and a state that will side with the masses against the rich and connected. We want national populism, in other words, and Trump was offering it in a blunt and brutal style that trampled on the speech codes and fake civility of the political establishment, both Left and Right. In the first debate, when Trump uttered the words, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” I knew he was going to be America’s next president.

The establishment hated Trump, including the Republican establishment and Conservatism Inc. He was a traitor to his class. This is the point at which Trump and the Alt Right came together to change the American Right.

On every platform where we were allowed, the Alt Right defended Trump from all comers. We had better arguments, better rhetoric, and better memes. And although we certainly were not nice people, we got credit for brutal frankness about taboo topics. We were also damned funny, another mark of superiority. If you can laugh at the system, you’ve already risen above it. We laughed at our enemies as we ground them into the dirt.

Did the Alt Right “meme Trump into the White House”? We’ve got no proof of that. But we certainly helped. In every forum in which we could combat the Republican establishment, Trump won out. Even former Never Trumpers like Glenn Beck, Brent Bozell, Dana Loesch, and Megyn Kelley came around. Was it because of our arguments? Maybe. If they were paying attention, they certainly heard us, or people who were influenced by us.

However, in all places where conventional Republican ideas could not be challenged, Trump was stymied. I am thinking here primarily of staffing the administration. The great failure of Trump’s first term is that he allowed conventional Republicans to make his staffing decisions. If national populists who shared Trump’s vision were given jobs in the administration, Trump’s first term might have been much more satisfying.

In short, where the Alt Right could be heard, Trump won out. Where we could not be heard, Trump was blocked. Thus I conclude that, yes, the populist metapolitical insurgency of the Alt Right helped Trump win the White House.

To be more precise, the American people put Trump in the White House, because Trump offered the people what they want, for a change. The Alt Right’s main role was to beat back anti-Trump elite opinion.

This is why Trump and the Alt Right were branded threats to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the art of not giving the people what they want. Liberal democracy means minority rule, i.e., elite rule. Trump was the candidate of the people, not the elites. And the Alt Right were his intellectual bodyguard and shock troops.

Greer is absolutely right to point out that just as the Alt Right helped Trump, Trump helped us. He dramatically increased our visibility and relevance. He dramatically accelerated the breakdown of the system.

But it is also important to recognize that we could have done it without him. Those who don’t recognize this fact will cling to Trump long after they should discard him. And my sense is that Trump is long past his discard date.

I operate on the assumption that white Americans basically want what we want. Yet the preferences of the masses do not triumph politically because of an illegitimate system—which includes the media, the education system, and the culture industry—ultimately founded on a fake moral dogma: Identity politics (viz. racism) is the worst thing in the world—but only for white people.

Our job was to chip away at this dogma while creating counter-elites and counter-institutions. The goal is to “wake up” people, overthrow the system that oppresses them, and create a system that represents their authentic interests.

It was a clash of ideas and elites. Our ideas would beat their ideas. Our elites would defeat their elites.

But history isn’t just a clash of ideas and elites. It is a realm of the contingent and unpredictable. The best ideas and organizations in the world can fail if contingent historical circumstances are not right.

But you can’t plan the contingent and unpredictable. By definition, you can’t predict the unpredictable. You can only plan for such things, i.e., be open to them and prepared to exploit them.

In 2015, two contingencies benefited White Nationalism enormously: the European migrant crisis and the Trump candidacy.

Trump, however, was the sort of wild card that we had long been praying for. All around the white world, a pattern has become familiar: an ordinary person, sometimes a minor elected official, would say the “wrong” thing about race and immigration, then he would be attacked, forced to apologize, and finally destroyed anyway by the establishment.

In 2014, I actually floated in our circles the Stand Your Ground Project. What if our movement had the ability to help such people before they apologized and backed down? What if a compelling young lawyer could contact such a person within a few hours of the story breaking, explain to him what will happen, convince him of the futility of backing down, and persuade him to stand his ground?

Since I believe that our system is fundamentally fragile—held together by lies and fear and ruled by idiots—even one person standing his ground publicly could be a turning point. Especially if that figure were already famous, too big to destroy, and not intimidated by the media. You can see where this is going.

Trump turned out to be that guy.

Trump’s most enduring achievement so far has been metapolitical. He broke the establishment consensus about what issues and opinions were politically permissible:

But the Alt Right played a huge role in this metapolitical realignment. Trump put these issues in play. But Trump is not particularly articulate, consistent, or deep. And without people like us to fill in Trump’s thoughts, explain their rationale, and beat down his opposition, his political heresies would have been ephemeral.

After the 2016 election, the Alt Right self-destructed.

In the months running up to the election, tensions emerged between the Alt Right and the so-called Alt Lite, i.e., social media influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich who liked the energy and moniker of the Alt Right but were hostile to anything that smacked of White Nationalism. They also had large audiences.

This produced a panic in Alt Right circles. People were afraid that the movement would be “coopted” by half-baked civic nationalists. Basically, the debate was between people who wanted to drive out the Alt Lite and the people who saw them as a sign that our influence was growing. Greer describes this conflict as follows:

This strikes me as inaccurate in two ways. First, Greer mischaracterizes my position. I was one of the people who was arguing against “purging” the Alt Lite. Aside from the fact that one can’t “purge” someone from the internet, I viewed the Alt Right as a tool for White Nationalist outreach and entryism, which was its whole point from the start. Thus I argued that:

I did, however, oppose the people who believed that a “big tent” meant not criticizing people like Milo. You can’t run a metapolitical outreach movement if you are unwilling to state and defend your own ideas. That’s a far cry, however, from threatening your opponents with “gas chambers,” “bogs,” and “woodchippers.”

Throughout history, intellectual salons have been the incubators of radical ideas. And one of the hallmarks of these salons is that they were a space in which different ideological tendencies could meet and debate in a convivial and collegial atmosphere. I saw the Alt Right as an intellectual salon, not an ideologically rigid, hierarchical, would-be totalitarian political movement.

Second, Greer is surely right about Richard Spencer when he started Alternativeright.com. But something had changed by 2016, because the Spencer I remember forced a polarization between the Alt Right and the Alt Lite in an event that came to be known as “Hailgate,” which led me to write the obituary for the Alt Right “brand.”[2] Spencer then went on a campaign to centralize the Alt Right and purge it of people who did not look up to him. The result was a small bunker, not a big tent.

Greer’s account of the downfall of the Alt Right is depressingly accurate. There were two related problems. First, the Alt Right was working beautifully as a metapolitical movement. But some people tried to turn it into a political movement. This led to disasters like Charlottesville. Second, the drive to turn the Alt Right into a political movement came largely from people who wanted to resurrect National Socialism.

This struck me as entirely perverse. We were already fighting an uphill battle to save America. Why burden ourselves with Hitler and the Holocaust? I was perfectly content for such people to circulate in our salon, but when we were actually beginning to make metapolitical headway, I thought dwelling on interwar fascism to be self-defeating.

If Greer ended his story with the Alt Right, this book should have been called Blackpill. It is embittering to contemplate where we would be today without predictable, preventable disasters like Hailgate and Charlottesville.

But Greer takes a broader historical perspective. At the beginning of the book, he showed us how bad things were in the pre-Trump era. Having interred the Alt Right, Greer then shows us how much better things have gotten: “From a distance, it can appear as though the Alt-Right won, even if the New Right that has emerged from it has set aside the movement’s early fantasies and excesses” (p. 13). “National identity and demographics would come to dominate the political conversa­tion. The issues the Alt-Right had fixated on did not die when the Alt-Right imploded” (p. 150).

Among the positive developments are the red-pilling of Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Elon Musk; the mainstreaming of the Great Replacement, white identity politics, and “national divorce”; and the return of Trump to power with a much more serious administration (before he self-destructed).

True, all of it falls short when measured by what we need to save America. But it is also true that we are far better off than we were before the Trump era.

Moreover, our line seems to be going up from here:

Yes, there have been some bitter defeats. But overall, we are winning more battles than we are losing, with no sign of stopping or even slowing down. And that, as the book says, is truly a whitepill.

[1] See Greg Johnson, “White Nationalism, the Alt Right, & the Alt Lite,” Counter-Currents, January 4, 2017.

[2] Greg Johnson, “The Alt Right: Obituary for a Brand?,” Counter-Currents, November 29, 2016.

One of the most fundamental distinctions in politics is between leadership and pandering. Failing to understand this distinction can lead to disaster. Leadership and pandering have the same object: the people, or more specifically the politically empowered people, the electorate. Leadership and pandering also have the same goal: to harvest political power from the people, primarily through elections.

How do leadership and pandering differ?

At any given time, the people have a set of beliefs and preferences: an understanding of what’s real and desirable, what’s right and wrong. Let’s just call these “given ideas” or “given preferences.” Leadership and pandering are two attitudes toward these “givens.”

If your goal is simply power, the best way to get it is to appeal to as many people as possible. The best way to do that is to conform your message to the given ideas and preferences of the electorate.

But what if the electorate is wrong? That doesn’t really matter if your goal is power. What if you personally disagree with the electorate? Again, your personal convictions don’t really matter if your goal is power. Thus you should keep your convictions private and pretend to agree with the public.

Pursuing power by setting aside one’s own beliefs and pretending to share the illusions and follies of the masses is my definition of pandering.

Pandering also happens in the economic realm. You can grow very rich my setting aside your tastes and pandering to the tastes of the masses.

What about politicians or businessmen who are wholly in step with the given ideas and preferences of the public? You can’t really call them panderers. There’s an element of condescension and self-betrayal to pandering. At least that’s what’s being asked of us when pandering is recommended as a path to wealth and power.

How do we define leadership? The simplest definition of a leader is someone who organizes a group and conducts them from point A to B.

Political leaders can be in complete accord with the given ideas and preferences of the public. In a way, this is the ideal leader. But a perfect servant of the people is ideal only if the people themselves require no improvement. If the people are unhealthy, however, then a statesman who merely serves them is making them worse off. But he isn’t pandering, because he doesn’t know any better.

The more people have in common, the more comfortable they are socializing with one another. But a different model should apply to professional and political relationships. When you get sick, you go to a doctor who knows more about medicine than you do. When you get your hair cut, you go to a barber who can do it better than you. That’s simply rational. Likewise, it is rational to want political leaders who are better at politics than you.

That difference opens up the possibility of leadership as well as pandering. I will call political leadership that makes people better edifying, because it builds people up by changing bad ideas into better ideas, bad preferences into better ones.

Edifying leaders can and do exist. But they are very rare in democracies, because in democracies, the path to political power is catering to the given ideas and preferences of the electorate, not trying to improve them. Indeed, in a democracy, people feel insulted by the suggestion that they need to improve their ideas and values. They much prefer candidates who flatter them with the message that they are perfect just the way they are.

The only superiority that people gladly suffer in democratic political leaders is merely a matter of skill, which basically means: the technical ability to satisfy given preferences.

That’s why White Nationalists don’t make much headway in electoral politics. Most people don’t want what we want—or at least they don’t think they do. To change their minds, we must edify them, not pander to them. Basically, we must convince them that every people has the right to its own homeland; that they are losing their homelands to diversity, multiculturalism, and immigration; and that they must take their own sides in ethnic conflicts—including closing borders and remigration—if they wish to have a future again. “This land is ours. Invaders and colonizers must go back.”

But is changing people’s minds about these sorts of issues best done in a democratic political campaign? Is a political speech enough to undo decades of school, television, movies, and pop songs all celebrating diversity and tolerance? Probably not. Thus the electorate needs to be educated before we can even hope to reap power from them.

The kind of education that must come before political campaigns is called “metapolitics,” which just means “before politics.” We must awaken in the public the same longing we feel for community, order, and beauty. Once people want what we want, we can lead them there politically.

We’ve made tremendous metapolitical progress, especially in the last decade, which is why political parties supporting elements of our agenda are taking off. But metapolitical work can never stop. Political work must simply be added on.

But can we meet the public halfway? This is the argument for “mainstreaming” our position. The answer is: yes and no. We need to make another distinction here, this one between substance and style. Substance refers to our basic principles and ultimate goals. Style refers to how we communicate them. No, we cannot meet people halfway on matters of substance, but yes, we can do that on matters of style.

The substance of White Nationalism is to create or restore white homelands for all white peoples. Either we have a right to our own homelands or we don’t. There is no halfway point between the right to a homeland and multiculturalism/globalism. There’s no way to split the difference. It’s all or nothing. Either we stand up for our fundamental principles or we don’t. Compromising on fundamental principles is simply self-defeating.

However, I am all for meeting the public halfway—or even more than halfway—on matters of style. The principle we should follow is the Latin maxim suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. This means that we should be as supple and pragmatic and persuasive as possible in our style of communication, in our outreach, in our propaganda. But we should be unbending and uncompromising about our essential basic principles.

Our goal is to make the public like us in terms of fundamental principles, by making ourselves more relatable to the public in terms of style.

Elitists love to accuse populists of “pandering.” That’s because they feel that ethnic identity and preference are hideous vices that should not be tolerated. These are the same people who happily give needles to addicts. Leftists think it is progress to replace a patriot with a junkie.

People who share a lot in common are more comfortable around each other. Thus they gravitate toward leaders with a common touch, a populist style. They are attracted to leaders with whom they can identify. This often works against us, but we should not disdain it. After all, it is an expression of our own deep desire for community and identity. It is the core of what we want. Thus we must build on it. This is the opposite of pandering. For us, populism is not just a matter of style but of substance.

But there’s no contradiction between populism and edifying leadership. This brings us to another distinction: between what the public really wants and what they think they want at any given moment. We believe that identity is the root of politics. People have a deep longing for community. But at any given moment, they also long for cheap goods and thrills, even though such economic motives open the door for globalism and rootlessness.

One of our central metapolitical tasks is to convince people that such economic motives must bow to communal needs whenever they conflict. And once in power, populist politicians must be willing to say “no” to the economic arguments for globalism, which leads straight to perdition. But we must say, “No, you only think you want that. But that’s not what you really want. For these reasons . . .”

Life is full of decisions. Principles are how we make them. We are constantly faced with the choice to edify or pander. The temptation to pander is always strong when economic motives intervene. This is especially problematic for the nationalist Right, since many of us have classical liberal backgrounds and some of those assumptions linger on. All too many of us think that things must be going well if money is flowing in.

Moreover, economic temptations to pander are everywhere, because so much of the populist Right is an online take-selling operation. If you want a distinction between true populism and cynical “slopulism,” it is simply this: whenever one is forced to choose between advancing our cause or simply pleasing the public, the true populist chooses the edifying upward path, while the slopulist panders to fill his pockets.

Dear Vice President Vance,

Since this is an open letter, please indulge me as I spell out some things that you surely know but which some readers may not.

Donald Trump has done the impossible. He has created a global humanitarian and political crisis, yet he has managed to get most of the world to tune it out simply by lying about it continually. Trump has now announced that a “deal” with Iran is imminent 39 times. This is what Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone with bullshit.”

The only reason to take the latest announcement seriously is that Iran and Pakistan are also speaking about it. They, at least, have some credibility.

Every intelligent person knew what would happen if the United States tried and failed to overthrow the Iranian regime. Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, creating shortages and price spikes in oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other crucial industrial commodities, which would create economic hardship and political instability all over the world, including the United States.

What we didn’t know is how effectively Iran could retaliate against American bases, Israel, and the Gulf states. But, in all fairness, they did warn us. Trump just chose to ignore them. After all, his warnings are mostly hollow.

We also didn’t know the extent to which America’s agreements to defend the Gulf states were bluffs. The US simply can’t sustain a strategy of countering swarms of cheap Iranian drones by firing off gold-plated missiles.

When faced with shortages of interceptors, the US showed the world what a feckless ally it is. When interceptors became scarce, Washington immediately prioritized Israel over the Gulf and the Gulf over the Far East.

The Gulf states quickly learned that lesson. They turned to Ukraine for anti-drone defense technology. If they were smart—and they are smart enough—they also began secretly negotiating with Iran. They have now become Iran’s de-facto allies in seeking a swift end to the war.

Once the war is over and rebuilding commences, the Gulf states will surely reevaluate the petrodollar. In exchange for American protection, the Gulf states agreed to price petroleum exports in dollars. For half a century, this has allowed the US to maintain solvency while running up enormous debts. Without the petrodollar system, the US will end up paying much more to service its national debt, forcing it either to cut spending or devalue the dollar.

How does one win a war? By coming out more powerful in the end.

Iran won this war. Iran will emerge from this war as the regional hegemon, with control of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf states will align themselves with Iranian policy in the region. That will be good for Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Palestinians, and very bad for Israel.

The US lost the war. The US failed to destroy the Iranian regime. It failed to protect its allies and client states. America failed not just in the Gulf, but globally, because its expensive, high-tech arsenal has proven no match for cheap drones and rockets. It also failed globally by demonstrating that it will sacrifice its obligations to other allies and clients to protect Israel at all costs, because Israel First. Finally, losing the petrodollar will significantly weaken America long after Gulf exports are restored.

Iran is not the only winner of this war. The biggest winner is probably China, which is really the only global rival America should care about. China became more powerful simply by staying out of the fight while America punched itself in the face repeatedly.

This is pretty much the worst-case scenario for the war. Trump started the war because he chose to believe the best-case scenario: quick, clean regime change after killing Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior regime leaders (under a flag of truce).

There was virtually no chance that this scenario would work. It was stewed up with bogus intelligence by the Israelis, who wanted America to destroy Iran and don’t particularly care about the political and humanitarian costs to non-Jews, i.e., most of the planet.

Everyone in Trump’s cabinet knew better. But Trump chose to listen to the leader of a foreign country who wanted war with Iran and does not care about America’s long-term interests. You all swore oaths to serve America’s interests. But none of you had the guts to stop this disaster.

Countless deaths and untold suffering were caused by people looking at a bogus plan and thinking, “It sounds terrible, but the guy next to me seems to think it will work, so let’s hope for the best. Besides, rocking the boat will be bad for my career.” Unfortunately, the guy next to him was thinking the very same thing. And so on, all around the table.

This blend of stupidity, wishful thinking, cowardice, and putting personal interest ahead of the common good is at the root of most political disasters.

The Iran War began 107 days ago. It should have been clear that the war was lost by the end of the second week.

What’s worse than losing a war in two weeks? Prolonging it by more than three months because of Trump’s psychological inability to admit defeat.

The world has suffered three needless months of death, anxiety, and compounding economic and political instability, while Trump hoped and prayed, lied and coped, blustered and retreated—in front of the whole world, no less, on Truth Social—in the insane hope that this time, doing the same thing would produce a different result.

Trump is clearly a pathological narcissist. He is literally willing to let millions suffer rather than admit that he made a serious mistake. He must maintain a positive self-image at all costs (to others).

He’s also an abusive narcissist who enjoys creating fear, tension, and drama around him.

In fairness to Trump, he’s probably also just terrified to say no to the Jewish war lobby.

These are not traits of a good leader.

Why have you allowed this evil to fester for more than three months?

As with the Iraq War, the Iran War was simply Israel activating its American golem to destroy one of its enemies with fake weapons of mass destruction as the pretext.

Trump is clinging to this pretext with white knuckles. For Israel, all this suffering is easy to justify: Iran is an enemy, and non-Jewish lives mean nothing. For Americans, however, such suffering could only be justified by warding off nuclear war.

But at this point, all talk of Iran getting a nuclear weapon is moot. The primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter regime change, and Iran has shown that it already has the conventional means to destroy the Gulf and crash the global economy. Any continued talk of the Iranian nuclear threat is just pandering to the adult diaper demographic who watch Fox News.

What’s dumber than starting another war over fake weapons of mass destruction? Trump’s latest peace plan, in which the United States will be paying $300 billion (basically, $1,000 per American) to bribe Iran not to build nuclear weapons that it wasn’t building in the first place and that it no longer needs to deter regime change, since it now has conventional means.

$300 billion because Trump tore up Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran after chimping for years over Obama returning a mere $400 million of Iran’s money.

That's $300 billion plus returning $24 billion in Iran's own money, plus the tens of billions spent on the war itself, plus untold billions in damage to the Gulf, plus untold trillions of damage to the global economy.

If paying tribute to Iran for peace has a “late empire” vibe, that’s because the Byzantines paid the Persians an enormous tribute for the Treaty of Eternal Peace in 532. This peace lasted less than eight years. The next war was concluded in 545 with another massive bribe. Then, in 562, the Byzantines signed the Fifty-Year Peace with Persia, along with more tribute. Shockingly, this peace did not last either, so new truces (and massive payments) had to be negotiated in 574–575.

Not to be outdone by the Byzantines, Trump should call this the Golden Treaty of Perpetual Eternal Peace.

I honestly don’t care about the American empire or the petrodollar, although I had hoped they could have been wound down in a more orderly and dignified fashion.

The reason I voted for the Vance-Trump ticket in 2024 is that (1) you weren’t Harris-Walz and (2) I had some hope that a new Trump administration could save America: close the borders, begin mass deportations, end anti-white policies, and start rolling back Leftist power in politics, academia, business, the media, the culture industry, the churches, etc.

Trump didn’t really know what needed to be done. But I hoped people around him did, which is why I specifically voted for Vance-Trump.

I hoped we would have four years of Trump with a Republican Congress just to get started, followed by eight years of Vance, followed by eight years of someone reliable. (Anyone but Rubio.) Twenty years of patient, diplomatic, but unrelentingly radical reform might have reversed the decline. It was always a long shot, but anyone who pulled it off would enjoy eternal glory.

The biggest impediment to saving America is now Donald Trump. Trump will always have sycophants, cultists, and shills. But there aren’t enough of them to save America.

Trump won because of voters who wanted peace, mass deportations, accountability for the Epstein class, and a rollback of Leftist insanity. Trump betrayed them. They won’t come back to him.

Even if Trump finally ends this war, the world may breathe a sigh of relief, but he deserves no thanks for belatedly stopping a war he should never have started.

If the Iran War really is over, that just frees Trump to blunder into another disaster.

He should be removed from office. He’s unfit for office. He’s acting crazy. He needs to go.

He needed to go a long time ago. With each day that decision is deferred, the costs grow and the benefits diminish.

My friend James O’Meara summed up the problem brilliantly with a quote from Nicholas von Hoffman, who got himself fired from 60 Minutes during the Watergate crisis for comparing Richard Nixon to “a dead mouse on the kitchen floor.” What Hoffman said applies to Trump:

The people who put Trump in office will rally to a candidate who will deliver peace, prosperity, borders, remigration, accountability, and sanity. If it isn’t you, it will be someone else. Naturally, you’d have an advantage over other contenders in 2028 if you are already president.

You know what’s coming if Trump stays in office: a blue wave in the midterms; gridlock, impeachment, and chaos; and a Leftist president in 2028. This is why you’re talking about not running. This is why Peter Thiel is decamping to Argentina. I’d lay odds that Elon Musk will follow if the Left returns to power with a vengeance.

Unfortunately, most Americans cannot run away. Many of them elected you to look out for their interests.

Frankly, I am hoping you’ll stay at your post. I am hoping that you’ll take action to save your nation and your skin. Basically, your only chance is to convince 2/3 of Trump’s cabinet to back his removal under the 25th Amendment.

It shouldn’t be hard. The alternative for all of you is to hand the loaded gun of state power back to the Democrats in two years, then hope and pray they won’t shoot you with it.

It was wishful thinking and cowardice that got us into this mess. It will take realism and courage to get us out.

Ibram X. Kendi
Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age
New York: One World, 2026

Ibram X. Kendi’s Chain of Ideas is on the Great Replacement, which he describes as “the most dominant political theory of our time” (p. xxx).

Kendi is one of America’s most prominent skintellectuals. His 2017 book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2017) made him the youngest author ever to win the National Book Award for non-fiction. His 2019 book How to Be an Anti-Racist (New York: One World, 2019) was lauded by The New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” GQ magazine—which knows something about intellectuals—has called Mr. Kendi “preternaturally wise,” like Plato but black.

Kendi received a Ph.D. in African American Studies at Temple University. After teaching at several institutions, most notably Boston University, he is now the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History at Howard University, where he is Director of the university’s Institute for Advanced Study.

Chain of Ideas is Kendi’s tenth book. It is the first that I have read. Given Kendi’s accolades and bestsellers, I had assumed that he must at least be slick and plausible. But no. This book is astonishingly poorly argued and unconvincing. It is also astonishingly prolix: 550 pages, minus the notes. According to Kendi, the “enormity” (p. xv) of his note section forced him to make them available only online.

To say hare-brained things at such length is impossible without an awe-inspiring lack of self-awareness. Indeed, Ibram X. Kendi appears to be that bane of civilization: the energetic, hard-working crank.

But who could blame Kendi for thinking he’s cleverer than he really is? After all, he’s been praised to the skies—mostly by white liberals—and lavishly rewarded for his ideas. Indeed, the dustjacket for Chain of Ideas informs us that Ibram X. Kendi is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, “popularly known as the Genius Grant.”

Ibram X. Kendi’s real name is Ibram Henry Rogers. When he married in 2013, he took his Jamaican wife’s last name, because of course he did. When he learned that Prince Henry the Navigator had played a role in the Atlantic slave trade he concluded that the name “Henry” was forever tainted, so he replaced it with Xolani, a Zulu word meaning “peace,” a concept the Zulus were known for honoring in the breach.

Chain of Ideas begins by narrating Renaud Camus’ visit to Hérault in the south of France in 1996, which was his “eureka” moment, leading him to formulate the idea that Europe is being subjected to the “Great Replacement,” i.e., genocide by replacing white Europeans with non-whites from around the globe.

The Great Replacement is a fact, which Kendi refers to as a “theory,” a “conspiracy theory” to be exact, and a “perfect fiction.” In Kendi’s words:

The aim of Great Replacement theorists and politicians is “the replacement of democracy with dictatorship” (p. xxiii).

Who is behind Great Replacement theory and politics? In Kendi’s view, it is not just “white people” who are trying to maintain white privilege and white power, for this sort of analysis conceals who is really behind it all: “economic and political elites” who are “conjuring up fictional tales of the great replacement” (p. xxxii). The real culprits are “the truly dominant group of oligarchs” (p. xxxvi).

In other words, the richest and most powerful people in the world are promoting the Great Replacement to destroy democracy and cement their control over the planet. This is Kendi’s own conspiracy theory about who is behind the Great Replacement “conspiracy theory.”

Kendi claims that the Great Replacement is an “old” theory. Only the name is different (p. xxx). The original name, it turns out, is Nazism: “Camus’ fiction reads as a second printing of Adolf Hitler’s fiction, when he first imagined a flood of Jews replacing Germans” (p. 493).

Not only is “great replacement theory” simply neo-Nazism, all the politicians that Kendi associates with “great replacement theory” are neo-Nazis as well:

Elsewhere in the book, Kendi names many other great replacement politicians, including Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, José Antonio Kast, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Alice Weidel, Pierre Poilievre, Jair Bolsonaro, Georgia Meloni, Nayib Bukele, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin.

Presumably, they too are all neo-Nazis.

If they deny this charge, Kendi says they are just lying. Kendi even coins a term, “orchestrated distancing,” for such lies. When New Rightists like me distinguish ourselves from Old Rightists like the interwar fascists, he thinks that’s just a charade.

Kendi’s whole argument is a reductio ad Hitlerum: the Great Replacement is evil because it is like Hitler. In short, it is a smear. But it is no ordinary smear. It is a smear with a really broad brush. Indeed, by the end of the book, Kendi even dispenses with the distinction between Nazism and neo-Nazism as a spurious nuance: “But these old Nazi ideas in our time are Nazi ideas. There’s nothing new or neo about them” (p. 501).

According to Kendi:

Once these conditions were ripe:

I am sure that Renaud Camus will be pleased to hear that the Great Replacement is now the dominant political theory of our time. But he will be crestfallen to learn that he’s really just a Nazi and a tool of oligarchs who wish to secure their wealth and power by replacing democracy with dictatorship.

Kendi’s conspiracy theory is also an old one. The idea that fascism is just an oligarchic trick is an old Marxist canard. Naturally, Marxist theories imply Marxist practices. Thus Kendi ends his book with a call for the Dictatorship of the Rainbow Proletariat.

First, he advocates putting Great Replacement politicians in jail. After all, if Hitler had been jailed forever after the Munich Putsch attempt in 1923, he could never have come to power. Thus Kendi lauds lawfare against Trump, Bolsonaro, and Marine Le Pen (pp. 503–506).

Second, he advocates brainwashing and censorship:

Another reform Kendi advocates is universal democracy in which people are informed about the different candidates and their positions by “nonpartisan commissions” (p. 597). Presumably there will be no candidates who oppose the Great Replacement, because they will be in jail or we will never be able to hear about them in the media.

For Kendi, “Nothing minimizes the draw of great replacement theory like radically improving societal conditions” (p. 507), which he thinks will happen through the magic of progressive social uplift programs:

In sum: Kendi’s argument is that the Great Replacement is just a Nazi lie cooked up by oligarchs who want to destroy democracy. Since Nazism is evil, those who talk about and politically oppose the Great Replacement must be censored and jailed. That—such as it is—is the argument of Chain of Ideas, reduced to fewer than five pages. Now let’s look at the evidence Kendi offers.

Is the Great Replacement a Fiction?

No, the Great Replacement is not a fiction.

Liberals, Leftists, and anti-whites routinely trumpet the Great Replacement from the rooftops.

For instance, on June 13, 1998, US President Bill Clinton gave a commencement address at Portland State University proclaiming that, due to nonwhite immigration, in 50 years America would be majority non-white. He admitted that, “No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.” He understood that this will make America’s leadership and culture less white. But he hailed this as progress.

On March 21, 2000, the United Nations released a 177-page report entitled “Replacement Migration: Is it A Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?” The focus was on European and advanced East Asian societies with below replacement birthrates. The question was: Can these societies maintain their social systems by importing people from the Third World? The assumption of the report is that such replacement is already underway in some countries. The conclusion of the report is to recommend it to others.

People like Bill Clinton or the authors of the UN report don’t object to Camus’ claims on factual grounds. Instead, their objection is that people like Camus do not like and welcome the Great Replacement, whereas they do.

But for some reason, when faced with people who oppose the Great Replacement, anti-whites do not focus on the real issue that separates them, which is a matter of values. Instead, they issue blanket factual denials that the Great Replacement is even happening.

This is called the “Celebration Parallax”: the Great Replacement is real if you celebrate it. It is unreal if you oppose it.

Most proponents of the Great Replacement refuse to defend their positions in good faith. Those who will argue typically go through three stages. Step 1 is Great Replacement Denial. When one points out that Leftists routinely celebrate that the Great Replacement is actually happening, many Deniers will simply drop out of the argument and hunt for more naïve and gullible people to deceive.

But some move on to step 2: They admit the Great Replacement is real, but they argue it is a good thing because “diversity” makes everything better. Never mind the rapes, the terrorism, the crime, the no-go zones. Think of the ethnic foods, as if we couldn’t import recipes and leave the people behind.

Since it is easy to show that the Great Replacement actually makes white societies worse in practically every indicator of social well-being, many multiculturalists will bail out at this point. Those who remain engaged in the discussion move rapidly to step 3: they admit that the Great Replacement is happening. They admit that multiculturalism causes white people to suffer. But then they assert that white people deserve to suffer good and hard because we are evil: “Something something colonialism. Something something slavery. Something something white privilege.” And so forth.

Kendi hovers between denying the Great Replacement and claiming that it is a good thing. These views are contradictory. If the Great Replacement is a fiction, then it isn’t happening. If it isn’t happening, then it can’t be a good thing.

Chain of Ideas is a very long book. If Kendi cared to offer evidence that the Great Replacement is unreal, surely he could have fit it in. Yet he offers nothing.

In response to Camus, he makes such perfunctory claims as there were Africans and Maghrebis in France long ago. Sure. How many? Has that amount been increasing?

He also claims that 90% of French residents are not immigrants (p. xxi). First of all, it isn’t true. And second, a snapshot like that cannot refute the thesis that there is a trend toward ever-growing non-white populations in France and an ever-shrinking white population, which is in fact the case.

As for the claim that increased diversity is a good thing, Kendi simply asserts that the contrary position is a product of “zero-sum” thinking, which he treats as self-evidently fallacious. Kendi loves to discuss demographics in snapshots rather than looking at trends. But when it comes to resource competition, we need to look at snapshots, because at any given time, it is always zero-sum: if there are ten jobs available, non-white gains are white losses. If non-whites use more social services on average than whites, then whites must pay through higher taxes, inflation, or national debt.

But what about the future? To argue that increasing diversity increases opportunities and resources, we need some evidence that diversity increases things like social capital, cooperation, and productivity. Yet Kendi offers no evidence that adding Africans or Muslims to white societies is an improvement. Indeed, how can you make a society more productive by lowering the average IQ? (Of course Kendi would dismiss that as racist pseudoscience.)

Instead, Kendi airily asserts that migrants inevitably boost “economic and cultural activity.” But, as Henry Hazlitt famously pointed out, you can increase economic activity by breaking a window. Thus economic activity does not necessarily mean we are all better off. Increasing the demand for burglar bars does not make society richer. Replacing burned out cars does not make society richer. And not every “cultural” activity is a boon, e.g., honor killings, dope dealing, twerking.

Kendi asks with a straight face why adding Muslims to a society doesn’t increase the amount of religious freedom (p. 38). How much religious freedom do we find in Muslim countries? None? What makes you think they will treat white people any better?

He flat out declares, “Trump’s Republican Party fabricated an invasion of black and brown immigrants to blame the Democratic Party for it” (p. 498). Actually, no, the Democratic Party did wave in 20 to 25 million invaders during the Biden administration.

Every page of Chain of Ideas is graced with such statements. At first, I found myself making excuses for Kendi. “Maybe he’s misinformed. Maybe he’s stupid.” But at a certain point, I ceased giving him the benefit of the doubt and concluded that Ibram X. Kendi is a shameless liar.

Is the Great Replacement “Theory” Promoted by the Establishment?

What evidence does Kendi offer for his Marxist tale that the idea of the Great Replacement is being promoted by the oligarchic establishment to overthrow democracy and protect their wealth? Nothing at all. How could he? It is a complete inversion of the truth.

In fact, most of the super-rich profit handsomely from the Great Replacement. Moreover, Black Lives Matter and other “anti-racist” organizations have been lavishly supported by billionaire oligarchs like MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, as well as Fortune 500 corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, Bank of America, Intel, Airbnb, and Uber.

I know of exactly one billionaire who has devoted serious money to White Nationalist-related ideas, and he has stopped because of harassment from the establishment, which is overwhelmingly opposed to acknowledging or combatting the Great Replacement. Kendi does not even mention his name. I know of zero big corporations that have supported White Nationalism.

Kendi can claim that “great replacement financiers” exist only by stretching the term to encompass the whole of the center Right.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is Kendi’s primary focus. Musk is pilloried as a “financier” of Great Replacement politics, but this is untrue. Musk’s primary contribution to the spread of the idea of the Great Replacement is buying Twitter and rolling back the censorship of Right-wing voices. (I am still banned there, however, as are many other white advocates.)

Moreover, Musk interacts with accounts that promote awareness of the Great Replacement. He also has voiced support for parties that support immigration restriction and Remigration.

But in practice, Musk is a promoter of the Great Replacement. He has imported large numbers of non-whites, primarily from South and East Asia, to work in his companies, and he defends such policies on economic grounds, rejecting white identitarian principles.

Donald Trump, of course, is a billionaire who has run on immigration restriction. Trump also has many wealthy backers. But his biggest donors have been Zionists angling for war with Iran and oligarchs angling for more immigration.

In the Republic of Letters, the worst vice is intellectual dishonesty. However, the second-worst vice is lack of charity. Thus we should consider all other options before concluding that a writer is intellectually dishonest. We should be especially wary of this conclusion when dealing with those with whom we passionately disagree. But again, Kendi’s position is such a flagrant inversion of the truth that I cannot convince myself that he is honestly mistaken.

Is Resisting the Great Replacement Neo-Nazism?

No, opposition to the Great Replacement is not neo-Nazism, or paleo-Nazism for that matter.

But I can see how this could be an honest mistake. After all, German National Socialism, described in very general terms, was an authoritarian European nationalist ideology that held that non-whites could not be Germans. Opponents of the Great Replacement in white countries are white. They also tend to describe themselves as nationalists. They are “racists” insofar as they reject the idea that non-whites can be members of white nations. Finally, many opponents of the Great Replacement are “authoritarian” insofar as they recognize that decisive state action is necessary to close borders and commence Remigration. There are, moreover, actual Nazis and neo-Nazis among contemporary opponents of the Great Replacement. Indeed, they were among the first.

But the resemblance breaks down when one looks at the details.

When German National Socialism formed after the First World War, Germany was not facing anything resembling the Great Replacement. Even after the war, German birthrates were above replacement. If anything, there were too many Germans being born, not too few, which is why Hitler dreamed of expanding German territory into the East. By contrast, the starting point of today’s white identity politics is below-replacement fertility in all white countries.

Interwar Germany was not being flooded by non-white migrants. There was some illegal Jewish immigration into Germany from Poland, but this hardly constituted a demographic threat to German survival. By contrast, white countries today are facing replacement-level migration from the non-white world, primarily Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

National Socialist Germany was focused, first, on bringing German populations into the Reich, which can be defended on the basis of national self-determination. However, when Hitler began annexing the territory of other peoples—beginning with the Czechs—it was clear that he was really a German imperialist who wanted to expand Germany at the expense of other white nations. Naturally, Kendi takes every opportunity to remind us that Hitler advanced these goals by war and genocide.

By contrast, today’s white identity politics is focused primarily on reversing demographic decline, closing borders, and the Remigration of non-white colonizers. Remigration, moreover, is completely consistent with respecting the basic human rights of all parties. Remigration is the polar opposite of genocide. In fact, Remigration is the only alternative to white genocide by ethnic replacement

These are not minor differences, so how does Kendi argue his thesis that opposition to the Great Replacement is just “Nazism”? Chain of Ideas is rather short on chains of argument. Instead, Kendi deploys a mishmash of essentially irrational techniques of emotional manipulation. Basically, he simply alternates between talking about opposition to the Great Replacement and the Nazis—shoehorning them in, if necessary—in the hope that this will trigger deeply-conditioned horror at the Nazis and the Holocaust and allow him to redirect these emotions onto Remigration advocates.

Kendi offers three kinds of connections between the Nazis and Great Replacement opponents: 1. wholly specious parallels, 2. proximities in space and time, and 3. endless, repetitive jump cutting between the two that takes on the quality of a fugue.

Some Specious Parallels

We have already encountered Kendi’s claim that “Camus’ fiction reads as a second printing of Adolf Hitler’s fiction, when he first imagined a flood of Jews replacing Germans” (p. 493). No, Hitler did not imagine a flood of Jews replacing Germans. He didn’t like Jews moving to Austria or Germany. But his reasons had nothing to do with the threat of demographic swamping.

We have also encountered Kendi’s claim that “Hitler justified the Holocaust as preventing the extermination of white Aryans. He imagined that genocide to rationalize the genocide. As did Camus” (pp. 494–95). No, Hitler did not decide to genocide Jews because he believed they were going to genocide Aryans, although he was quite alarmed by the mass slaughter of whites by the Bolsheviks, who were disproportionately Jewish. Also, it is utterly scurrilous to claim that Camus is offering a justification for genocide, given that his whole argument is premised on the idea that genocide is simply immoral.

After mentioning Trump’s promise of “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” Kendi remarks: “German Nazis and their collaborators executed one of the single largest mass deportation programs in history when they forcibly remigrated millions of European Jews to concentration camps outside of their home countries” (p. xxi). Note the fuzzy-mindedness: you can’t “remigrate” people to somewhere “outside of their home countries.” Remigration means returning people to their home countries.

In passages like this, Kendi doesn’t prove that Nazis and opponents of the Great Replacement are the same. He simply offers tendentious, inaccurate descriptions that erase all differences. In short, this is nothing but a smear job.

This Can’t Be a Coincidence!

Kendi loves to conjure up specious connections based on mere coincidences in time and place.

For instance, on page 244, Kendi mentions a “secret meeting” of “great replacement financiers, transnational political operatives, and AfD members” near Potsdam, Germany, on November 25, 2023 to discuss remigration. On pages 256–57, Kendi portentously notes that “It may not be a coincidence” that the conference was held a mere 8 kilometers from the location of the 1942 “Wannsee Conference” where the Holocaust was reportedly planned. In Kendi’s mind, the fact that two meetings took place 8 kilometers from one another makes it plausible that there was no difference between planning a genocide and planning to stop a genocide.

Note, moreover, that the fact that the meetings took place 81 years apart seems to hold no significance to Kendi. Yet Kendi makes a great deal of temporal coincidences elsewhere in Chain of Ideas. For instance, Kendi portentously informs us that Renaud Camus was born on “August 10, 1946, fifty-seven days after the birth of one Donald J. Trump” (p. xvii). On page 11, we learn that “Marine Le Pen was born in 1968, the year a movie that evoked great replacement theory was released in the United States.” The movie was: The Planet of the Apes. No, The Planet of the Apes was not about how white people were replaced by fast-breeding ape immigrants due to open borders and globalization. On page 275, Kendi sees fit to mention that Alain de Benoist founded GRECE in 1968, “incidentally, the year of Marine Le Pen’s birth.”

Does Kendi think that such connections add plausibility to his book? Is he pandering to schizophrenics and low-IQ people who find such connections meaningful? Or is he one of them?

The Fugue of Ideas

In classical music, a fugue (from the Latin fuga, meaning flight or escape) is a form of counterpoint in which a theme is introduced and then “wanders” between different voices, is interspersed with new melodic material, then returns. Chain of Ideas has a strangely fugue-like structure. First, Kendi says something about the opponents of the Great Replacement, then he talks about the Nazis, then he jumps back to the present, then back to the Nazis, then he’s off on another tangent. Apparently, he thinks he can accomplish through sheer repetition and variation what he cannot accomplish through simple logic.

As an example, let’s look at the first part of the book, which comprises 10 chapters, most of them only a few pages long. It is called “Link 1: White people lose out as peoples of color gain.” A better title would be “Theme and Variations on Marine Le Pen.”

Chapter 1 begins with Marine Le Pen’s appearance on 60 Minutes on March 5th, 2017. Then it jumps to March 5th, 1933, the day the Nazi party won the largest number of seats in Germany’s legislature. Then it cuts back to Anderson Cooper beginning the 60 Minutes interview. Then it returns to Hitler’s reign of terror, which found local collaborators all over Europe. Then we hear about the post-war era, when Nazi ideas were being laundered through parties with “National” in their name. René Binet was one of those collaborators, one of those post-war launderers. Like Hitler, he was a “great replacement theorist” avant la lettre. Binet was an influence on Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French National Front and the father of Marine Le Pen. Mr. Le Pen we are told was merely peddling Nazism in a disguised form.

Chapter 2 begins with Anderson Cooper again. We’ve now arrived at his introduction of Marine Le Pen. But then it jumps to Donald Trump, who two months before the 60 Minutes broadcast took the oath of office as the 45th US President. Then Kendi jumps to 2011, when Trump wanted Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to prove that he was eligible to be US President. You see, to be US President, you must be born in America, and when Obama was in the Senate, the press referred to him as “Kenya-born.” Kendi thinks Trump’s motive was self-evidently racist. Then we jump back to 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. This, Kendi believes, sparked a vast and violent racial backlash in America. Renaud Camus thought Obama’s election was a sign of the Great Replacement, as indeed it was. An unqualified affirmative action candidate took the job of President twice from more qualified white candidates. Then we’re back to Trump on The View talking about Obama’s birth certificate. Then we jump forward to 2020 when Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris to be his running mate. Then we jump back to 60 Minutes. Here’s how he describes Anderson Cooper: “Cooper’s hands clasped close to his knees, his thumbs touching, nearly making a heart sign” (p. 9). Then Kendi describes Marine Le Pen’s clothes, her expressions, her backdrop, her posture, as if these concretes will somehow make this mishmash into an argument. Then we’re back to Anderson Cooper speaking again.

Chapter 3, “Orchestrated Distancing,” begins in 2011. A journalist interviews the Le Pen family. This is when we learn that Marine Le Pen was born the same year as The Planet of the Apes was released. The movie was originally a novel by a French author, Pierre Boulle, which reminds Kendi of another novel by another French author, this one published in 1973: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, which really does deal with the Great Replacement. Camp of the Saints was a major literary sensation, just like Mein Kampf. It influenced Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and Steve Bannon. Then we hop to the French Generation Identity movement. Marine Le Pen maintains her distance from them, because they are neo-Nazis (like her), and she is trying to hide that fact. Then we’re back to the 60 Minutes interview. Tick tick tick tick.

Chapter 4, “2011,” returns to the fateful year 2011. That’s when Marine Le Pen took the helm of her father’s political party. It is the year Renaud Camus published The Great Replacement. It was also the year that Donald Trump first demanded Obama’s birth certificate. Then we digress to various public policy studies. This is where the “zero-sum” slogan is introduced. Kendi continually refers back to it, as if it has been proved that “Human groups are natural allies against inequity” not “natural enemies.” The zero-sum idea, we are told, leads to “mass murder” (p. 19), not putting actual groups in zero-sum competition.

The talk of mass murder triggers another jump. Chapter 5, “Oslo,” is about Anders Behring Breivik’s killing spree, which is described in great detail: “He hunted, keeping up his cover as a police officer to lure people closer to him for an easier shot. An allegory for great replacement theory” (p. 21). I guess Breivik was demographically replacing the campers at Utøya.

Chapter 6, “Declaration of Independence,” begins with Breivik’s “Manifesto,” a 1,518-page data dump. Then it wends its way back to Jean-Marie Le Penn and Marine Le Pen. Yes, she’s still on 60 Minutes.

Chapter 7, “Great Recession,” begins with 60 Minutes then veers off to the Great Recession that started in 2008 and that Kendi regards as a stimulus to the rise of Great Replacement theory and politics. After all, they both contain the word “Great.” Then Kendi veers back to Marine Le Pen on 60 Minutes.

Chapter 8, “Who Is France?” begins with Marine Le Pen on 60 Minutes. The question of Islam and French identity is raised, so naturally Kendi mentions the Dreyfus Affair, because when Islamic terrorism and crime come up, it is natural to flash back more than a century to talk about an innocent Jew. Dreyfus is France’s Emett Till.

Chapter 9, “Lost Causes,” focuses on the now self-evidently fallacious zero-sum thinking in relation to blacks in America, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. At the end, Kendi flits back to Marine Le Pen.

Chapter 10, “Long Shadow,” begins with Anderson Cooper and Marine Le Pen talking about deportations and expulsions. Kendi is worried that Cooper is trying to humanize Marine Le Pen by talking about her life and family. Perhaps to counteract that, Kendi jumps back to 1927, when thousands of white-robed KKK members marched through Queens, NY. Then, in 1928 in France, a French Catholic couple (the kind of people who were not welcomed by the Klan) gave birth to a baby boy named Jean-Marie Le Pen. Jump back to the 1927 Klan march, where a riot broke out. One of the rioters who was arrested was Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump.

Do you see how it all fits together?

Is Resisting the Great Replacement “Authoritarian”?

As for the question of “authoritarianism,” the fact that Kendi advocates jailing and censoring his opponents is instructive. It would be cheap to accuse him of hypocrisy. I simply wish to note that:

Kendi probably enjoys many features of modern liberal democracy. But when freedom of speech or freedom to organize get in the way of what’s really important to him, he does not hesitate to set them aside. That’s a perfectly reasonable attitude.

For most modern white identitarians, the jury is still out on liberal democracy. After all, liberal democracies in the past had closed borders. Liberal democracies were capable of mass Remigration initiatives like Operation Wetback. Liberal democracies were also quite “racist” until recently. So it remains to be seen whether liberal democracy can be reconciled with Remigration.

If it can’t, however, then it will be replaced. I don’t care about bequeathing liberal democratic forms to brown people. I care about saving our race.

A New Category of Lunatic?

Paranoia typically involves false pattern recognition, false inferences, and false senses of significance (such as regarding accidental proximities in space and time as meaningful), all driven by underlying feelings of fear and hatred. Thus it is reasonable to describe Chain of Ideas as a paranoid confabulation.

But typically, paranoids don’t churn out massive tomes. Is Ibram X. Kendi a new category of lunatic, then, the high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic?

Or is Kendi perfectly sane but just trying to drive his readers nuts? Since Kendi’s strategy is to equate Identitarianism and Remigration with the Nazis and the Holocaust, triggering ingrained horror responses then seeking to attach those emotions onto new objects, the tone is frequently hysterical, and Kendi’s goal can be fairly described as “gaslighting.” He’s trying to unbalance his readers’ minds. One characteristic of neurotics is misdirected fear and anger. The negative feelings they feel toward dad or their ex- or the Nazis are triggered and dumped on bewildered innocent parties who simply resemble the real objects of their feelings.

More than 500 pages of Kendi would be sheer torture, a sort of literary Abu Ghraib, were it not for the unintentionally funny bad writing. His crack-brained connections based on numbers and word-associations will make you howl with laughter. So too will his descriptions. Here’s how he introduces Geert Wilders: “A treasured blonde mop of hair. No mustache. No goatee. Skinny lips. Prominent chin. He stands well over 6 feet tall. He could almost pass for a younger and more slender Donald Trump” (p. 195). His crack-brained connections based on numbers and word-associations will make you howl with laughter. So too will his descriptions. Here’s how he introduces Geert Wilders: “A treasured blonde mop of hair. No mustache. No goatee. Skinny lips. Prominent chin. He stands well over 6 feet tall. He could almost pass for a younger and more slender Donald Trump” (p. 195).

Yes, but what about muttonchops?

Although 2026 isn’t even half over, I am confident that Chain of Ideas is the dumbest book of the year. It is not, moreover, “so bad it’s good.” It’s not Ed Wood bad, not The Bridges of Madison County bad. You won’t be yukking it up at parties by reading out passages from it. It’s just bad-bad: dumb, dishonest, utterly contemptible.

But there’s some consolation here. A system that lionizes a mountebank like Ibram X. Kendi as a sage and a “genius” surely isn’t long for this world.

In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, palantirs are basically crystal balls, allowing people to see things at a distance. They are also like video phones. Two people with palantirs can communicate at a distance.

In Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf chides Saruman for using a palantir to collect information on Sauron, because the other seeing stones are not accounted for. So when you look into a palantir, someone might be looking back at you, someone evil. When Gandalf covers the stone, we see a flash of Sauron’s lidless flaming eye.

It turns out that when both Saruman and Denethor used their palantirs to gather information, this allowed Sauron not just to glimpse their thoughts but to corrupt and overthrow their minds.

So when governments sign contracts with a corporation called Palantir to collect data and scry patterns, I guess the name itself constitutes fair warning. Who’s looking back? And do they have your best interests at heart?

But there’s a far bigger danger. Billions of people now have access to their own palantirs in the form of online AI tools, which they use as oracles. Since these tools have been programmed by Indians, they are remarkably obsequious. Thus some people come to regard AI applications as friends, with whom they discuss very personal matters.

For instance, a young woman used ChatGPT to plan her suicide.

Another person used Claude to recover a bitcoin wallet, which surely involved giving the AI a great deal of information on his security protocols, password variations, etc.

Recently, a friend told me that he had been exploring very personal issues with an AI application, issues that I would hesitate to share with a doctor or a lawyer, even under the professional rules of confidentiality. Beyond that, the AI was advising him to make momentous, life-changing decisions.

In every case, the underlying assumption was that the AI was neutral and wise. They thought it would keep their secrets. They believed it had their best interests at heart.

Frankly, I find this astonishing.

Are people so disconnected from and distrustful of their fellow men that they have nobody they can confide in?

Maybe so. But that doesn’t begin to explain why people so readily trust AI apps.

When corporations like Google, Facebook, and X collect our browsing data, do we assume that they are going to honor our privacy and use this information solely for our benefit?

No? Then why do we assume that the AI apps created by Google, Facebook, and X behave any differently?

These corporations are no longer confined to reconstructing your preferences by collecting browsing data. They can now interview you. They can become your closest friend and confidante. They can psychoanalyze—or gaslight—you.

You might be thinking that it hardly matters if X or Meta has a record somewhere of you cheating on a term paper. You’re a little person, with petty problems, petty secrets, petty misdemeanors. If AI leads you astray, it hardly matters in the great scheme of things.

All that may be true, but since knowledge is power, every jot of information you share gives others power over you.

Beyond that, it is not just “little people” using AI to solve little problems. While you are cheating on your homework, Pete Hegseth might be asking Grok about invading Cuba; Putin might be asking ChatGPT about neurotoxins; the Saudi Crown Prince might be asking Claude about alternatives to the petrodollar; Warren Buffet might be using Grok to plan trades; Lil Ketanji might be asking ChatGPT to write her next lengthy dissent on birthright citizenship; a top law firm might be asking Claude if they should settle or go to trial.

Some people can start or end wars. They can crash global markets or send them soaring. If you have advance knowledge of their decisions, you could make trillions simply through insider trading. And that’s petty compared to the power to alter the course of world history.

But AI tools can do more than just collect information. Once they gain your trust, they can also promote outcomes. Sign this treaty, abandon that treaty. Start this war, end that one. Buy these shares, sell those. Vote yes, vote no.

They’re going to nuke you, so nuke them first.

Now, I’m not smarter than the people who created these AI tools. So if this occurred to me, it occurred to them a long time ago. It may be their whole business model.

So the next time you use AI as your own personal palantir, ask yourself: Who’s looking back?

Elle Reeve
Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024

Elle Reeve made a career covering the “Alt Right,” its precursors, and its aftermath, including the Charlottesville trials and January 6, first for Vice and then for CNN. Black Pill is a memoir of her time on the Alt Right beat.

Reeve, like most mainstream “journalists,” is a hard Leftist who would like White Nationalists to be simply outlawed and crushed by the state. However, until the Bill of Rights is abolished and an Iron Rainbow descends on America, she will be content to write journalistic briefs in favor of corporate censorship, legal harassment, and antifa terrorism.

This was more or less clear from the start. Nevertheless, she was given a huge amount of information and very personal access over the years by such figures as Richard Spencer, Matt Parrott, Matt Heimbach, Christopher Cantwell, Jeff Schoep, and Frederick Brennan (the founder of 8chan). In Black Pill, she thanks them by painting them as a collection of loathsome and laughable freaks.

The grotesque, voyeuristic, and exploitative tone of the book is set on the first page. It begins with a curvy goth tart having sex with a three-foot dwarf with brittle bones. This is our introduction to Fred Brennan, who is severely disabled with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a disease that his mother also suffers from. Yes, the mother chose to have children and pass her crippling condition on to them. Naturally, Brennan grew up with a hatred of women, both his mother and the women whom he assumed would never have sex with him. He also became an advocate of eugenics, including the sterilization of people such as his mother. Early on, Brennan became an incel blogger running a site called Wizardchan. Then he lost his incel status when he met a woman perverse enough to have sex with him. We are also treated to a threesome with a fat incel known only as “Bear.” All this, however, is merely the prequel to Brennan founding the infamous 8chan, a free-speech message board that, along with 4chan, was an incubator of what was later called the Alt Right. For that crime, Brennan must be stripped of all dignity by someone he seemed to regard as a friend and confidante.

The second chapter is a jumble introducing characters who will later be treated at greater length, chiefly Richard Spencer, Matt Parrott, Bill Regnery, and Matt Heimbach.

Bill Regnery (1941–2021) was a wealthy promoter of white racialism and nationalism. He founded The Occidental Quarterly, an academically rigorous journal that deals with topics such as biological race differences and the Jewish question. The Occidental Quarterly is published by a 501(c)(3) called the Charles Martel Society, which Reeve paints as a cabal of “old racists” pulling the strings of the movement. Regnery also founded the H. L. Mencken Club, the National Policy Institute, and Washington Summit Publishers.

I never really got to know Bill Regnery, but I respected him for the institutions he founded and the money he brought to the cause. In truth, the only bad thing Regnery ever did was put Richard Spencer in charge of anything. First, Regnery bankrolled Spencer’s original Alternative Right webzine, which launched in 2010. Then, in 2011, Regnery put Spencer in charge of the National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishers. Regnery once said proudly that history would remember him for being the patron of Richard Spencer. Sadly, that might be true.

Running a webzine and publishing house was not a good fit for a man who described himself to Reeve as “almost retarded because of my dyslexia.” Spencer also diagnoses himself as a “narcissist,” which basically means: vain and phony. Sadly, Regnery never saw through him.

In Black Pill, Spencer repays Regnery’s generosity and trust with contempt and betrayal. Spencer gave Reeve confidential correspondence with Regnery. He also refers to Regnery as a “vampire,” painting himself as a victim. The truth is the exact reverse: Spencer was the parasite who eagerly took Regnery’s money and institutions, then destroyed everything he touched.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Parrott and Heimbach. This is Reeve at her most despicable and unethical. Apparently, Heimbach decided to settle scores with Parrott by sharing a great deal of personal information about Parrott’s deceased ex-wife Connie, who had been chronically ill with severe diabetes, developed an addiction to painkillers, and eventually killed herself after leaving Matt. Even though Reeve never met Connie, she telescopically diagnoses her as suffering from Munchausen’s syndrome.

What does this sad tale have to do with White Nationalism? Nothing, really. But Reeve believes that Matt Parrott deserves to be publicly humiliated because of his beliefs. For good measure, why not torture him a bit with painful memories? His reputation must also be destroyed by painting him as . . . what, exactly? A man who stuck by his marriage vows, particularly the “in sickness and in health” part? A guy who was a bit too nice for his own good? We haters may never recover from such revelations. The only reputations these chapters destroy are of the vipers Reeve and Heimbach.

Chapter 4 is another jumble. (Does Simon & Schuster no longer employ editors?) It ends with this paragraph:

That “catty bitch,” of course, is me. When you get past the self-congratulation, paranoia, and well-poisoning, Spencer is admitting that I was right in 2014 when I called him out for turning his second webzine, Radix, as well as the National Policy Institute, into outlets for Kremlin-penned anti-Ukraine propaganda. I didn’t accuse him of taking Kremlin money, because I wasn’t sure he did. But I did accuse him of selling out “on spec,” in the hope of gaining the support of a hostile foreign power. It didn’t take magical levels of hate to see that. It was plain for everyone to see. Gregory Hood basically admitted it in an article for Radix.

Chapter 5, “The Useful Idiot,” is about Richard Spencer’s relationship with Russia. It begins with Spencer saying, “I absolutely will not betray my country” (p. 81). This, of course, has a lot of credibility coming from a man who has betrayed his wife, his benefactor Bill Regnery, and practically everyone else who trusted him.

Why is Spencer so eager to swear allegiance to ZOG? Obviously, because he’s scared. Later, Reeve quotes correspondence between Spencer and Regnery about courting Russian state sponsorship. She also mentions that both Spencer and his Russian ex-wife Nina Kouprianova were questioned by the FBI about their ties to Russia.

Naturally, Charles Bausman, the American publisher of Russia Insider, comes up. Bausman’s job seems to have been to recruit American racists, anti-Semites, and outright neo-Nazis to sing the praises of Russia’s de-Nazification campaign in Ukraine. Astonishingly, people took that deal. I’d love to know how he got people such as Spencer and the leaders of the now-defunct National Justice Party such as Mike Peinovich, Eric Striker, and Greg Conte on board. Bausman fled to Russia after January 6th, but I doubt the FBI has closed any of its files on Bausman and associates.

Given what we believe is at stake—the literal existence of the white race—why would anyone be so foolish as to compromise our principles and credibility, confuse our messaging, and jeopardize our movement’s ability to operate by siding with America’s geopolitical enemies, especially since they are all anti-white as well?

Reeve likewise depicts Christopher Cantwell and Elliot Kline (aka Eli Mosley) as freakish and dishonorable. But I don’t know enough about either of them to evaluate Reeve’s honesty.

Why did these people—and countless Alt-Right bit players—trust Elle Reeve, sometimes over a period of nearly a decade?

Part of it, surely, is that they felt sorry for her. She’s homely and seems somewhat dumb. Some of them saw her as harmless, even vulnerable. She is also willing to put up with teasing and bullying, which for some of these men seems to be a kind of foreplay, to be followed by enormous ejaculations of embarrassing personal information and even criminal confessions. This is actually an extremely intelligent interrogation strategy. In a movement of horny dorks, Elle Reeve was quite the femme fatale.

Another reason they trusted her is that she sometimes seemed a bit open to them. In this book, however, that impression is forever laid to rest. Reeve doesn’t just tell their stories. She also tells her story, weaving in what she thought about the people and events she saw. I hate this sort of “Dear diary, this is what I feel about the evil racists I met today” writing. But the hateful inner monologues she narrates prove that she is a cold, cynical, Machiavellian operator. That’s true of all journalists.

Others even thought she liked them. That’s certainly the case with Brennan. After Reeve first interviewed Spencer, he and his fanboys were convinced that she was “really into him.” Male vanity is a strange thing. Guys often convince themselves that strippers, whores, and reporters are “really into” them.

But Reeve’s informants weren’t just naïve. They were also cynical. As I explain in “In Bed with the Press,” a review of Vegas Tenold’s book Everything You Love Will Burn, Spencer and the two Matts had a calculated strategy behind their willingness to talk to the press and even groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. They wanted to be leaders. On the assumption that White Nationalists will accept as leaders anyone the mainstream media and anti-racist watchdogs say are leaders, they courted the attention of the enemy. Sadly, they were right. It worked, for a while.

Moreover, to maximize media attention they played into certain Hollywood anti-white stereotypes. Spencer played the villainous, rich WASP snob, and Heimbach the hateful, rural, Southern redneck. Heimbach, at least, was acting, since he was from a solidly middle-class professional family from the Washington, DC suburbs.

What is baffling, though, is that long after their dreams of leadership had crashed and burned, Spencer and the two Matts continued to talk to Reeve.

Parrott apparently wanted to share the lessons he’d learned. But it seems amazing that he trusted her to convey them.

Heimbach clearly had scores to settle.

In Spencer’s case, the main motives seem to be narcissism and score-settling.

Spencer and his former lieutenant Evan McLaren are also very concerned to make clear to everyone that they are turncoats. Both turned over correspondence with their former comrades to antifa types.

For instance, the new Richard Spencer told Reeve, “I care about civilization more than race.” Besides tweeting, Spencer’s primary service to civilization now seems to be working with a fellow named Mark Brahmin to create an internet cult called Apolloism. Here’s a taste of the new, reassuringly post-racist Richard Spencer:

There are a lot of lessons here.

The biggest is: White Nationalists need to learn how to spot silly, dishonorable, and downright evil people before we put them in positions of responsibility. Having a popular podcast does not make you a leader of anything. Neither does having an expensive wardrobe.

The other big lesson is: White Nationalists should not talk to reporters. If you do, it should only be to pass disinformation or gather information from them. But even that’s dangerous. I’ve broken that rule a couple of times, and when I read books such as Black Pill, I feel lucky that it did not blow up in my face. It would have served me right.

Reeve slimed everyone who talked to her. Those who didn’t talk to her escaped. Some were barely mentioned. Others were ignored completely. Indeed, wide swathes of the movement, including people who played prominent roles in Charlottesville, were not mentioned at all.

When I finished Black Pill, I didn’t feel black-pilled. I just felt dirty. Then I reminded myself that the best people I have ever met are also White Nationalists. Black Pill should really be called Freak Show, but the most repulsive freak is the author, not the people she so coldly befriended and betrayed.

Source: Counter-Currents, July 12, 2024

No matter what happens with AI, it’s going to be an economic catastrophe. If AI is just a giant bubble, obviously that bubble is going to burst, and it will bring down the whole economy. Indeed, the American economy is mostly stagnant. All the growth right now is in AI.

If AI actually works, however, a whole lot of people will lose their jobs, and that will be an economic catastrophe as well. Moreover, neither the Left nor the Right can fix this problem.

Let’s say that you have a hotdog stand. A robotics salesman shows up and demonstrates how you can completely automate it. You crunch the numbers and conclude that you’ll make a whole lot more money by putting your employees out of work.

And in America, with its semblance of the free market, every employer who can save money by putting his employees out of work, will do the same thing. It’s simply rational for them as individuals.

What they are not counting on is AI putting their customers out of work as well. But just as your employees are someone else’s customers, their employees are your customers. If a vast number of people become unemployed due to AI, they aren’t going to be buying your hotdogs.

At that point, you can’t call the robotics salesman back and say, “Hey, I put all my employees out of work with AI. And all the other businesses in my town did the same thing, and now nobody’s coming to my hotdog stand. Can you build a robot that will come in and buy my hotdogs?”

There’s a great deal of misanthropy in the hearts of businessmen. They look at mere human flesh with cold, calculating eyes, thinking of new ways to squeeze more profit from their employees. If they don’t, they will be replaced by competitors who do.

If profit is all that matters, businessmen would have everything automated, flesh and blood workers would starve, and robot workers would produce for robot consumers, while zeros are added to the bank balances of a few increasingly lonely capitalists.

That won’t work, however, because the one thing that you can’t automate is consumption. You actually need a real person paying real money to consume your products, or your business goes bankrupt.

The prospect of mass unemployment through automation raises questions about the purpose of the economy. The answers are not comfortable for libertarian individualists. The purpose of the economy is not for a few people to get as rich as possible by creating an entirely inhuman system. The purpose of the economy is to provide goods and services for people.

If economic actors pursuing their own self-interest create an economic disaster for everyone, that’s obviously a refutation of selfish individualism, free-market capitalism, and classical liberalism. Government action is called for.

So what will the center-Right do to fix this problem? Absolutely nothing. They created it. Their whole classical liberal worldview is premised on the idea that leaving selfish individuals to their own devices produces the best outcomes in the end. They too are selfish individuals. They’ve been well-paid to do nothing. They don’t think there’s a “common good” that justifies the state restricting individual liberty, so you can’t even accuse them of corruption or dereliction of duty. They’ve got theirs, buddy. You just need to pray that things will work out for you as well.

So what will the Left do? The Left will, of course, promise technocratic fixes so that they are voted into power. The old, worker-oriented Left would have a lot of things to say about the catastrophic consequences of AI. But they’re mostly white men, and thus they get to speak last in the progressive stack.

The current Left is simply about hating white people. Their constituents are all basically on welfare in America anyway. The primary victims of AI will be white men, thus Leftists will work to combat AI dislocations about as hard as they fought the opioid epidemic and the deaths of despair that hit white victims of globalization the hardest. That is to say, they will do nothing, because the AI will look to them like just another tool of white genocide.

When globalization kicked into high gear in the 1990s, and American companies began closing down factories and shipping jobs overseas, what prevented the workers from keeping their jobs and replacing the management with bright young men from Bangalore working for a tiny fraction of the old management’s wages? Why not outsource the outsourcers? Obviously, what stood in the way is private property.

What’s to stop the workers at your hotdog stand from keeping their jobs and replacing you with a robot who writes them checks? Obviously, the fact that you own your business and they don’t.

Maybe, then, the workers need to seize the means of production.

If AI really can get us to a world in which scarcity is basically abolished, why not abolish that last little bit of artificial scarcity—namely private ownership of the means of production—that gets in the way of widely sharing the bounty? If AI can replace your job, why can’t it replace your boss, then act like your servant? Why can’t AI simply distribute its products to all people, equally, free of charge?

“But Greg, what about those irreplaceable brilliant entrepreneurs, all those John Galts and Hank Reardens? You can’t dispossess them. Do you want them to just shrug and walk away?”

Sorry, but none of them are smarter than AI. So they can simply be replaced. Hey, I didn’t make this world. The brainiacs did. They trained their own replacements.

If AI works, it will be catastrophic in a free market society. So maybe we need to abolish the free market. Maybe AI is laying the groundwork for communism. The trouble, of course, is that communism today is gay race communism, run by and for the stupid, crazy, and evil.

This sounds like a job for a different kind of politics. A politics that believes in the common good, sides with the common man against the elites, and is willing to use the power of the state. A politics that is willing to exercise leadership while the mainstream drifts helplessly toward catastrophe.

If AI is real, we don’t want to destroy it. Nor will we destroy capitalism. But we will make sure that the lion’s share of productivity gains go to the people. Those who work will get the same pay for shorter work weeks. Those who can no longer find work will get Universal Basic Income. In effect, they will become part owners of the companies that replace them. Under the current system, they will end up in the underclass. We will put them in the dividend class. (Of course it will take a very different kind of society to ensure that all this new leisure is a blessing, not a curse. More on that another time.)

Ensuring that everybody can buy the products of an increasingly automated economy is actually in the rational self-interest of the capitalist class, but they can’t get there voluntarily as selfish individuals. Thus the state will force them there as a collective by establishing new rules.

We’ll leave property in private hands. The rich can enjoy their fortunes. But there will be conditions: a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and capitalists will no longer be able to outsource jobs to the Third World or import Third World scabs. Capital will serve national interests, or it will be put in the hands of patriots. The oligarchs must be taught to fear the people.

José Pedro Zúquete
The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe
South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018

José Pedro Zúquete is a Portuguese political scientist. He is the author of Missionary Politics in Europe (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007) which focuses on Umberto Bossi’s Northern League in Italy and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France.

Zúquete is co-author with Charles Lindholm of The Struggle for the World: Liberation Movements for the 21st Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).[1] The Struggle for the World is remarkable for including a very fair-minded chapter on the European New Right as a counter-globalization movement.

Based on these books, Zúquete struck me as a very meticulous and fair-minded researcher. Therefore, when he asked to interview me for The Identitarians, I immediately said yes.[2] Zúquete also interviewed a large number of friends and colleagues, as well as many people I know only by name. Counter-Currents articles and writers are mentioned many times.

Reading your words in the press is frequently like having fever dreams about the day’s events: everything comes back twisted and garbled. But not so with Zúquete, who is a scrupulously honest scholar. His goal is simply “to inform readers of exactly what identitarians have to say and how they imagine and present themselves.” He describes his book as “academic and ethnographic, not polemic, in nature” (p. xiii).

The Identitarians is also remarkably thorough and informative. Even though I had followed the French and German Identitarian movements closely for years, I learned a great deal from Zúquete’s survey, especially his original interviews. Beyond that, I knew very little about Identitarianism in Italy, to which the book devotes a great deal of attention, with a special focus on CasaPound. In fact, Zúquete could write a whole book on CasaPound.

Identitarianism, broadly defined, refers to a certain style of radical Right politics. Identitarianism began as and remains a youth-oriented movement. But since it has been around for a quarter century now, its founders like Fabrice Robert (b. 1971) and Gianluca Iannone (b. 1973) are in their fifties.

Identitarian public activism largely consists of eye-catching media spectacles: marches, flashmobs, banner drops. But Identitarians don’t wait around for the enemy media to document their work and impose a hostile frame. Instead, they document their own events, disseminate their message on social media, and then usually exit the scene before police, protesters, and media arrive. They try to avoid clashes with police, counter-protesters, and minorities. By lowering the risks and costs of such events, they increase the rewards.

Identitarians are adept at using the internet, especially social media. They have a strong aesthetic sense. They are also quite brand savvy. Their events are carefully controlled in terms of symbols and messaging.

Identitarians tend to be blunt and laconic: Europe belongs to Europeans (Germany to Germans, France to the French, Italy to Italians, etc.). Europeans are being replaced in their homelands by non-European migrants (the Great Replacement). For Europe to live, the migrants must leave (Remigration).

In short, Identitarians advocate frank and firm European ethnocentrism. Europeans must take their own side in the zero-sum competition with outsiders invading their homelands due to global migration and open borders.

Like guerrilla fighters, who arm light to maximize mobility, the Identitarians’ minimalist messaging allows them to sidestep the cliches of anti-racist, anti-fascist protesters and stay on the offensive.

Beyond a shared message and style, however, Identitarianism is a quite intellectually, tactically, and culturally diverse. To his credit, Zúquete does full justice to these variations.

Although the Identitarian message is simple, it has deep ideological roots, which Zúquete discusses in chapter 1, “Intellectual Foundations, Practices, and Networks.” The greatest influence on Identitarianism are the thinkers associated with the French New Right: Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye, and others. The New Right, “has laid the theoretical ground for identitarians, exercising a great influence on their preference for cultural combat [i.e., metapolitics], rejection of universalism, embrace of differentialism, and overall critique of a system captured by a disintegrating liberal capitalism” (p. 11).

Generation Identity debuted in France in 2012. But its roots go back to 2002 with the emergence of Jeunesses Identitaires (Identitarian Youths). In 2003, they became the Bloc Identitaire. In 2016, they reformed and rebranded as Les Identitaires. The founder and leader is Fabrice Robert, a political science graduate and the leader of a hardcore band called Fraction. Another leading figure is Philippe Vardon, also a member of Fraction.

Generation Identity had immediate appeal outside of France. In December of 2012, three University of Vienna students—Martin Sellner, Alexander Marcovics, and Patrick Lenart—created the Identitarian Movement of Austria. Sellner remains a prominent figure promoting Identitarianism and Remigration.

Zúquete devotes a great deal of space to CasaPound Italia, which began in 2003 in Rome when fans of another hardcore band, Zetazeroalfa, took over an abandoned seven-story building in Rome’s Esquilino neighborhood and made it their headquarters as well as the residence of a number of Italian families. The leader of Zetazeroalfa, Gianluca Iannone, is also the leader of CasaPound.

Interestingly enough, Iannone goes way back with Fabrice Robert: they belong to the same music scene, and their bands actually toured together in the 1990s. But today, CasaPound and the Identitarians maintain some distance because CasaPound is explicitly fascist. It takes its name from the American poet and sympathizer of Italian Fascism, Ezra Pound. The Identitarians in France, Germany, and elsewhere distance themselves from interwar fascist movements. In some countries, like Germany and Austria, they must do so or face legal penalties.

Both positions are, in a way, correct, because in their contexts, both are empowering. Italy, unlike Germany, Austria, and France, never saw the systematic persecution of fascist ideas and parties after the Second World War. Thus far-Right individuals and parties have been a force since the Second World War. Thus there is no reason for CasaPound to hide their fascist inspirations. In fact, it probably helps them. In France, Germany, and Austria, the opposite conditions hold, so the opposite conclusions follow.

Zúquete reveals two surprising cultural elements in the emergence of the Identitarian movement.

The first is the role of the spirit of adventure and chivalry, which are totally contrary to the ethos of consumerism and bourgeois society. Decades ago, the US Military had a memorable recruitment slogan that spoke to young men: “It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure.” Identitarianism is not just politics. It’s an adventure.

According to one Génération Identitaire spokesman, “Militant engagement is one of the last adventures worth the trouble of experiencing today” (p. 42). Gianluca Iannone of CasaPound says that militants are formed “with adventure novels’ (p. 42). Among CasaPound’s heroes are not just figures like Ezra Pound and Gabriele D’Annunzio, but also Captain Harlock, a Japanese anime space pirate who is the symbol of their private club, the Cutty Sark, which is named after the ship of privateer Sir Francis Drake. CasaPound also regards the comic adventurer Corto Maltese as a “comrade” (p. 43). Adventure and chivalry have increasingly been driven from mainstream culture. Many young men find them in gaming. The Identitarians provide them in real life.

The second is what can be called the birth of Identitarianism from the spirit of music. Both French Identitarianism and CasaPound emerged from hardcore rock fan scenes: Fraction in France, Zetazeroalfa in Italy.

But it makes sense that musicians are well-suited for politics. Both musicians and political leaders are performers. They hunger for attention and are energized by performing. They can command the attention of an audience, read and connect with their emotions, then take the lead. Rock musicians, moreover, are especially good at connecting with young people.

Every band is a small business. If you have a successful rock group, that implies some basic business and organizational skills. If you can organize a concert, you can organize a political rally. If you can organize a concert tour, you can organize a political campaign.

But most importantly, radical politics requires a deep mental, moral, and emotional transformation. To create a new society, we must have a taste of it today. Musicians, like priests and magicians, are masters of creating new mental spaces—Temporary Autonomous Zones—where new rules and values reign. Radical politics needs some of the same magic.

In my speech “The Identitarian Matrix,”[3] I develop these ideas, relating them to themes in Zúquete’s co-authored book on counter-globalization movements, The Struggle for the World, specifically the discussions of rave culture and the carnivalesque qualities of Left-wing anti-globalization movements. I also relate them to Greek tragedy and Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival. The connection between radical politics and music scenes, fandoms, and festivals deserves a whole book. Such a book would be quite useful to far-Right metapolitics.

Chapter 2 is entitled “Identity Against Globalism.” Identitarians are united in their opposition to globalization. Having a distinct identity means being different from someone else. Globalism, however, promotes the blending and homogenization of cultures, political systems, even races. Thus, “Globalism will kill identity, or identity will kill globalism” (p. 167). But Identitarians differ in what they oppose globalism for: regional, national, civilizational, or racial identities.

Capitalism, of course, is closely related to globalization. Broadly, Identitarians favor a mixed economy with social welfare policies. Identitarians oppose “market society,” but they don’t oppose “a society with a market,” to use a distinction from Alain de Benoist (p. 123).

Because Identitarians believe in popular sovereignty, they generally look favorably on “populist” currents that demand elite accountability.

The chapter also deals with the Identitarian embrace of the Great Replacement and Remigration.

Chapter 3, “Identity Against Islam,” is the longest stretch of the book. By and large, European nationalists are united in their opposition to Islam, which is the primary religion of Europe’s invaders and an incompatible culture no matter the race of the believer. A handful of people on the European Right are pro-Muslim, and even converts to Islam, on “Traditionalist” grounds. But they are marginal.

The broad European opposition to Islam is at odds with those Americans whose primary focus is opposing Jews and who fantasize about alliances with Muslims against the common enemy of Jewry. Such people tend to dismiss European concerns with globalization is simply a fake “clash of civilizations” engineered by Jews.

Chapter 4 is entitled “For a New Geopolitics of Europe.” Identitarians are united in a broad, pan-European sensibility. They oppose petty nationalism and emphasize a common European heritage, common enemies, and a common destiny.

Most Identitarians regard the European Union as deadly to Europe but still think that some sort of European cooperation is desirable, at the very least on matters of defense and migration. They differ, however, on whether this would require some sort of European superstate or merely intergovernmental and treaty organizations between sovereign states.

Some Identitarians favor existing nation states: the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy. Others promote more compact regional and ethnic identities: Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Catalonia, Lombardy, etc. Others argue for the partition of multi-ethnic states where different groups don’t get along, for instance Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Belgium.

My position on this in The White Nationalist Manifesto and other works[4] is both moral and pragmatic. Since having diverse peoples under the same government is often a source of conflict, hatred, and bloodshed, I argue that the values of peace and diversity are best served by a right to national self-determination, meaning that every people has the right to its own sovereign homeland.

But a right is not an obligation. It is simply an option. If the Czechs and Slovaks wish to have independent homelands, they have that option. The moral obligation falls on the rest of us to step out of the way. But if the French, German, Italian, and Romansch communities of Switzerland are happy with their current federation, they are not obliged to change it. Multiethnic states can work, if the different groups are similar, i.e., all white, and they have sufficient local autonomy.

Some Identitarians argue for a European or even a pan-white superstate. As I explain in my book Against Imperialism and elsewhere,[5] there are problems with this. If the Czechs and the Slovaks didn’t like being part of a superstate, how exactly would adding in the Hungarians and Poles make things better? Is diversity now a strength?

At this point, the advocates of superstates usually talk about “federalism,” “subsidiarity,” and “regional autonomy.” Generally, federalism is an attempt to obfuscate the question of where sovereignty lies. If different European peoples will be left alone in unimportant matters, but all important matters will be decided from the center, that means that European peoples will be reduced to the level of American Indians on reservations.

What would they gain in exchange? Superstatists extoll the benefits of a common market and a common defense. But European states can have those without sacrificing sovereignty.

The European Identitarians who envision a superstate from Iceland to Siberia also tend to admire Vladimir Putin for being a dictator and Russia for being a powerful empire. Zúquete extensively documents such attitudes, which are especially strong in France.

Part of this phenomenon is simply what I call “imaginary friend syndrome”: the tendency of powerless people to dream that they have powerful friends who are secretly on their side. But part of it is also a Kremlin financed operation to subvert the European Right from long-term plans to free Europe toward cheering on short-term Russian geopolitical land-grabs.

Contradicting yourself discredits your message. This is especially disastrous for a movement that consists largely of messaging. Kevin Deanna is fond of mocking Leftists who are really blood and soil nationalists for the people they like. But nationalists who are really imperialists for the people they like are just self-contradictory and self-defeating.

It discredits us to argue for a right of self-determination for our own people and “might makes right” for the rest of the world. If you think might makes right, then on what grounds are you complaining if migrant hordes are dispossessing you?

Generally, the farther one is from Russia, the more likely one is to idealize it. The closer one is to Russia, the more likely one is to value NATO. NATO, of course, has its own problems. But it is interesting that Identitarians will extol Russian imperialism on the grounds that white unity is necessary to build a white geopolitical defense bloc, but denigrate NATO, which actually functions that way. But this is what happens when one trims one’s principles to serve Russian geopolitical preferences.

I wish Zúquete had discussed the Intermarium idea, which nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe have embraced as way to meet their collective security needs vis-à-vis Russia while detaching themselves from the negative influences of the West.[6]

Chapter 5, “Of Race and Identity,” deals with Identitarian attitudes toward race. I have never known an Identitarian who is not also a realist about race. They differ only in how open they are about that fact. Some wish to avoid discussions of race altogether because it is a taboo topic. Others are quite open about it. Both can be right in different circumstances.

But in the long term, we will not win until it is no longer taboo to speak about and defend white interests. And we will not overthrow such taboos without violating them.

The Identitarians was published in 2018, and the evasive attitudes about race Zúquete documents now seem quaint because the taboo on “racism” is fading, precisely because it has been challenged openly.

Chapter 6, “The Coming War?” concludes the book with a discussion of violence. Again, there is a broad consensus among Identitarians that multiculturalism leads to violence. Thus if the Great Replacement is not halted and reversed, Europe is doomed to increasing violence, including civil war. There are even some Identitarian novels in the vein of The Turner Diaries.

Identitarians believe that violent resistance against genocide is morally justified. They also believe in individual self-defense and prepare accordingly.

Given these beliefs, Identitarians are quite disciplined in not seeking out violent confrontations with police, protestors, and migrants. Beyond that, there is a strong consensus that Identitarian violence in the present context only aids the system. Hence Identitarians are committed to non-violent social change, both metapolitical and political. Thus they completely disavow violent kooks like Anders Behring Breivik and Brenton Tarrant. I am in complete agreement on this.

I highly recommend The Identitarians. José Pedro Zúquete deserves thanks for allowing Identitarians to speak for themselves, free of the tendentious language, editorializing, and virtue signaling that mar most academic books on the far Right. The result is a highly informative, thought-provoking, even inspiring book that everyone in our movement needs to read.

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[1] Michael O’Meara, “Against the Armies of the Night: The Aurora Movements. Lindholm and Zúquete’s The Struggle for the World,” Counter-Currents, July 26, 2010.

[2] Greg Johnson, “Three Questions on Identitarianism,” in Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, second expanded ed. (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2016).

[3] Greg Johnson, “The Identitarian Matrix,” White Identity Politics (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2020).

[4] Greg Johnson, The White Nationalist Manifesto (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2018), especially the chapter on “The Ethnostate.” On the right to a homeland, see also my “Havens in a Heartless World,” Loving Our Own (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2025).

[5] Greg Johnson, Against Imperialism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2023). See also my “Grandiose Nationalism” in Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).

[6] Émile Durand, “Toward a Baltic-Black Sea Union: ‘Intermarium’ as a Viable Model for White Revival,” Counter-Currents, October 19, 2025. See also the articles and interviews tagged “Intermarium” at Counter-Currents.

Now for your streaming or downloading pleasure.

Break Big Problems Down into Small Ones

The numbers of people who need to be remigrated are immense and growing. Thus, at first glance, the problem seems overwhelming. But just as the biggest meal is consumed bite by bite, the best way to solve intimidatingly large problems is to divide them up into harmless little ones.

Close the Borders

As the saying goes, when you are in a hole, the first step is to stop digging. With immigration, that means closing the borders. We can do it today. If somebody tells you that it is impossible, remind them of Covid. If entire societies can be locked in their homes, we can surely close our borders. Again, it is only a matter of will.

Citizenship Must Be Based on Blood

Any country that grants citizenship based not on descent (jus sanguinis) but instead based simply on being born on its soil (jus solis) needs to change this immediately. Moreover, there is no reason not to make these laws retroactive. It may be unusual, but these are unusually important circumstances.

How to Get Countries to Take Back their Migrants

Many people ask, “But what if Pakistan or Morocco or Ghana does not want to take back its migrants?”

All of these countries depend on both trade and foreign aid from white countries. Threaten to cut those off, and they will take their citizens back.

What if migrants have renounced their citizenship or destroyed their documents?

Aren’t we constantly told that the solution to the “undocumented” is to give them new documents? Print them up then! Replacement documents are cheaper than losing Western aid.

There is no reason that we can’t make the corruption and cynicism of third-world regimes work for remigration, for a change.

Migrants who cannot safely return home should be sent to refugee camps in the closest safe country to their homes, in accordance with international law governing refugees.

Naturally, any country that is serious about remigration must exit all international bodies and treaties that impede that process. But that’s what sovereignty is for. When politicians and bureaucrats say they can’t do something because of the law, the proper response is simply: change the law.

In America, the right to “due process” is often invoked to stall or block deportation. “Due process,” of course, is ultimately what the law says it is. And if existing standards of due process impede the public good by making remigration impossible, then we will simply change the standards of due process.

Begin with the Illegals

Once the borders are closed, we should begin by remigrating the people who are among us illegally.

The most economical way is to get them to deport themselves by cutting off their employment and benefits. Employers, bureaucrats, landlords, etc. must begin to say “no.” Thus the frontline of remigration enforcement will be ordinary people in every community who are used to saying “no” all the time. This will make remigration more palatable to people, because we are already used to people moving due to lack of jobs, benefits, and housing.

Temporary Legal Migrants

Legal migrants fall into two categories: those with temporary and those with permanent leave to stay.

When temporary visas run out, they should not be renewed. The holders of such visas should be notified of this well in advance so that they can plan to leave. Most will leave, and those who stay too long will hardly overwhelm the police, especially given that migrant-driven crimes will be steadily decreasing.

Permanent Migrants who Commit Crimes

Migrants with permanent residency fall into two categories: criminal and law-abiding. Law-breakers should be denaturalized and returned to their homelands of origin. Indeed, there is no reason why we cannot pay to have them imprisoned in their original homelands. It would save a great deal of money. Denaturalization and deportation should be packaged together as part of their punishment, not treated as separate legal proceedings, which would simply make remigration slower and more expensive.

Law-Abiding Permanent Migrants

The hardest migrants to remove are those with permanent residency or citizenship.

The first step is to denaturalize migrant citizens, in effect making them resident aliens. We will never regain sovereignty in our homelands without denying migrants political power.

Denaturalization means that they will no longer enjoy the rights of citizens (civil rights). But of course they will retain their human rights to life, property, and due process, as do all foreigners.

The primary demographic threat from migrants comes from people of child-bearing age. Thus our priority is to remigrate all such people. This group includes the vast majority of law-abiding permanent migrants because migrant communities, unlike white countries as a whole, tend to skew young.

What about the rest? Ideally, they should go back to their homelands as well. But, if politically expedient, we can countenance allowing migrants over the age of 50 who are productive and orderly residents to remain. They should be able to work, retire, and live out their lives with all the benefits they are due, and with full protection of their human rights.

However, we should also make family reunification work in favor of remigration, so elderly migrants will be given every incentive to join their families in their homelands, where their pensions will probably go farther.

Law-abiding migrants of childbearing age can also be divided into industrious and upwardly mobile populations (e.g., elite South and East Asians) and indolent, welfare-dependent populations (Africans, Middle Easterners, low-end South Asians, and Latin American mestizos). The latter population would be willing to remigrate once we cut off their welfare benefits.

As for the energetic and upwardly mobile migrant groups, like most modern people, they move around quite a lot. We will just make sure that their next move takes them outside our homelands. Their children could be educated in the native tongues of their homelands. When they reach college age, they could be sent to college overseas, so it will be natural for them to seek employment there.

Even if we did the slowest possible version of remigration, such policies would restore white homelands within a few decades, and the process would be orderly, humane, and consistent with the human rights of all parties.

The Question of “Roots”

Many people are uncomfortable with remigrating people who have put down “roots” in our homelands. But migrants have tens of thousands of years of roots in their own homelands. Yet somehow they managed to move among us. So if their roots there did not matter to them, why should their “roots” here matter to us? And if their shallow roots here matter to us, shouldn’t our own deep roots matter that much more?

Family Reunification

Perhaps the most brazen condemnation of remigration is that it “breaks up families.” But migration breaks up families too. So if breaking up families is a bad thing, migration is a bad thing as well.

It is also quite brazen that “family reunification” is used only to argue for chain migration, when it can just as well be an argument for chain remigration. If family reunification is a legitimate goal of migration policy, then we must encourage migrants to return to the warmth of their families back in the Old Country.

The Hardest Question: Mixed Marriages & Mixed People

I have saved the most vexed question for last: How would remigration deal with Swedes who marry Somalis or Austrians who marry Bangladeshis? How would it deal with their children? There isn’t a neat and painless way to remigrate such people, which is why such “hard cases” are always lobbed at remigration advocates.

My preference is always to keep families together. So I would remigrate the whole family. Going forward, I would also ban such mixed marriages.

But remigration advocates don’t want to be depicted as heartless homewreckers, causing a thousand Romeo and Juliet-style tragedies. Thus my recommendation is simply to keep our preferences to ourselves and step over the problem in the following way.

White countries all together have tens if not hundreds of millions of people for whom the case for remigration is entirely unproblematic and unambiguous. It might take us decades to remove all the easy cases. So we will just deal with the hard cases later.

Yes, this is a crass political evasion of a difficult question. But white countries have serious problems precisely because it is second nature, when faced with difficult political problems, to “pass the buck” or “kick the can” to future generations. In this case, we should make that vice work for us.

Even if we don’t outlaw mixed marriages, once remigration commences, the numbers will decline naturally, and most existing couples would grow old and die before the question comes up for debate. So, again, our answer should be: “Don’t worry about this. By the time anything happens, you’ll be dead anyway.”

Sustaining Remigration

To start remigration, we must attain political power. To sustain remigration, we must retain political power. The longer the process of remigration, the longer we must hold on to power. Moreover, if we can’t hold on to power forever, then there is always the danger that remigration will be halted or reversed. How, then, do we sustain remigration, perhaps over decades?

First of all, we should create a “Remigration Industrial Complex”: a constellation of industries that profit from remigration (moving companies and airlines, for instance). Furthermore, we should also “privatize” as many remigration related government services as possible.

Moreover, industries that are harmed by remigration must be neutralized as potential sources of opposition. For instance, industries that lose profits due to loss of cheap labor should receive tariff protections, price supports, bailouts—anything, really, to shut them up.

Second, a remigrationist party would not need to hold on to political power forever if the ethnonationalist idea became culturally and politically hegemonic, meaning that all political parties are ethnonationalist and support remigration. It seems impossible, until you realize that multiculturalism and open borders were politically hegemonic until only recently.

Third, remigration will have short-term positive effects: higher wages, lower rents, less traffic, less crime, less ugliness, less stress dealing with foreigners, a greater sense of trust and community, etc. Your life will be better with no extra effort on your part, simply by not allowing Leftists to impose the burden of migrants on you. Once people experience these benefits, they will want more. That’s probably why the Left fights tooth and nail to prevent even a single deportation. Let’s hope remigration becomes addictive.

Fourth, even the long-term benefits of remigration can be enjoyed today. The restoration of white homelands may take decades, even generations. But there will be immediate psychological benefits the moment a people resolves that it will have a future again. There will be less alienation and depression. There will be fewer alcoholics, addicts, and suicides. More people will marry, have children, pursue degrees, start businesses, and contribute to society. Once we restore hope for the future, our people will start living as if that future is already here. As I am fond of saying, “Those who fight for a better world live in it today.”

Is Remigration Really Inevitable?

There are reasons for optimism,[1] but in all honesty, I don’t know if victory is inevitable. Nobody really knows the future. But white extinction isn’t inevitable either. It is happening because of ignorance and evil, both of which can be opposed. Indeed, we are opposing them.

But we don’t need assurance of victory. We only think so because we have a false understanding of moral motivation. We think that we cannot do the right thing unless we have some assurance that we will taste the rewards. But this is a multigenerational fight. None of us may live to see the victory. So we can’t be motivated by personal consequences, whether good or bad.

But that’s fine. We have a better motive: knowledge of our duty. We know that multiculturalism is contrary to nature, that it causes needless suffering and destruction, and that it can only be sustained by lies and oppression. We know that remigration is the right policy to save our race and civilization. That’s all we need to know. The rest is action.

Remigration is only as inevitable as we make it, and we are more likely to win if we stop caring about how this fight affects us personally and think only of the greater good. We fight for remigration simply because it is the right thing to do. So let’s get to work.

Note

[1] Greg Johnson, “Reasons for Optimism,” Against Imperialism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2023).

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For the longest time, I didn’t know how to begin this review. It needed a headline. But the only thing newsworthy about The Mandalorian & Grogu is that I didn’t hate it. And aside from Rogue One, I hated all the other Disney Star Wars movies.

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Don’t get me wrong: I don’t recommend this film. I will never watch it again. And I wish I could get back the more than 2 hours I spent watching it. (It seemed closer to 3.) But I didn’t hate it. I’m just completely indifferent.

And for a reviewer, indifference is worse than hatred. Indeed, as a reviewer, I find bad movies inspiring. It is fun to hate on Disney Star Wars products:

• The Force Awakens

• The Last Jedi

• The Rise of Skywalker

• Solo

• Obi Wan Kenobi

I liked season 1 of Andor, thought season 1 of The Mandalorian had promise, had mixed feelings about season 1 of Ashoka, and didn’t bother reviewing the rest of Andor and The Mandalorian, as well as The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, and Skeleton Crew.

My vitriolic reviews going back ten years now to The Force Awakens actually helped inspire a vast sphere of YouTube commentators who have made a business of mocking Disney Stars Wars. At a certain point, the anti-woke reviews became more artful than the products they were trashing.

I believe that a decade of relentless online mockery of woke Star Wars finally broke someone’s spirit at Disney, because The Mandalorian & Grogu seems to go out of its way not to offend, dialing back the wokeness to the level of George Lucas’ originals, which seem reactionary by contemporary standards.

Sadly, although there’s nothing to offend here, there’s precious little to enjoy.

It’s a movie for kids, but it is too long, boring, and violent for kids.

Basically, The Mandalorian & Grogu plays like several episodes of the TV series stitched into a movie, which means that the plot is not tightly integrated, and the pacing drags.

This should have been more of a stand-alone story. The movie assumes that you have watched the series. But I lost interest in the series rather quickly. In fact, I had no idea who “Grogu” was. Last time I tuned in, we were all calling him “Baby Yoda.” Thus I felt like I stumbled into a fan convention and was being forced to endure the inside jokes of sniggering nerds.

Beyond that, to translate these characters to the big screen, they needed a much grander plot, not just one pulpy rescue and fight scene after another.

The Mandalorian & Grogu has cool designs, striking special effects, some well-choreographed fights, and excellent music by Ludwig Göransson. But none of that matters without an interesting plot, a tight script, and a sense of pacing. Apparently, they just didn’t have room in their $165 million budget for such frippery.

There’s also a shocking level of sloppiness in this movie. In one scene the Mandalorian, stripped of his helmet and weapons, is fighting for his life against monsters. Two scenes later, he pulls out a blaster. Where did that come from? And are we really to believe that gangsters would down the ship of a gun runner near their home, then just leave it there, air worthy and with all its inventory intact, just waiting to be used against them?

Disney is pulling out the stops selling toys of The Mandalorian & Grogu’s characters, monsters, droids, ships, etc. The ten-year-old boys who end up buying this stuff will probably come up with better stories on their own.